Ohio AG agrees to pay $900K settlement to family of Norwalk man

The family of a Norwalk man once accused of murder could be receiving a large settlement from the Ohio Attorney General's Office due to mismanaged crime evidence. After spending 23 years in prison, Jim Parsons was released after a judge threw out his 1981 murder conviction. After his release, Parsons' daughters, Debra O'Donnell and Sherry Parsons, filed a lawsuit, accusing the attorney general's office of knowing evidence presented by former forensic analyst for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, G. Michele Yezzo, was falsified. The settlement was filed on Tuesday, and the attorney general's office has agreed to pay the family $900,000, which is almost the maximum settlement allowed by state law. The settlement from the attorney general's office must still be approved by an Erie County probate judge. The Parsons ordeal has received considerable media coverage over the years. Parsons was convicted of beating his wife to death in 1981, based on key testimony from Yezzo that claimed she conducted a test showing a blood-splatter on sheets matched up with the presumed murder weapon. The test led prosecutors to file charges against Parsons, but Yezzo later admitted to never performing this test. Yezzo then left BCI in 2009. According to the Ohio Innocence Project, Yezzo's personnel file indicated that there were several troubling aspects of her work and that she was forcibly removed from her laboratory two months before Parsons' trial for contentious dealings with co-workers. A supervisor's note in her file indicated that Yezzo would "stretch the truth to satisfy a (law enforcement) department." The Innocence Project's resurrection of the case led to the Huron County Common Pleas Court ordering a new trial, and Parsons was released on his own recognizance. Parsons died in 2017 at the age of 79, a few months after the murder conviction was tossed by the judge and a new trial could not be held. The Reflector reached out to the attorney general's office for comment but did not receive a timely response.