COLUMBUS — An Ohio appeals court upheld the conviction of a Nelsonville man on felony charges stemming from an incident three years ago, in which his 14-year-old son accidentally shot and killed an 11-year-old boy with a loaded firearm taken from the man’s unsecured gun cabinet.
The court also, however, upheld a decision by the trial court in the case to grant the defendant judicial release after he had served about a year in prison.
In February 2022, after a trial in Athens County Common Pleas Court, Donald Platt, now 40, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and endangering children and sentenced to four to six years in prison. The charges were filed against him after an incident that took place at Platt’s home on March 5, 2021.
Platt’s 11-year-old son had had a friend, 11-year-old Eli Spangler, visiting the home for a sleepover. At some point Platt’s other son, 14-year-old Mason Platt, took a handgun out of his father’s gun cabinet to show it to the two younger boys. According to trial testimony Mason Platt dropped the gun, and when he picked it up it fired, fatally wounding Spangler.
Mason Platt was adjudicated in Athens County Juvenile Court as delinquent after admitting to reckless homicide. His father was convicted of two felony charges for having not taken precautions that might have averted the accidental shooting.
Platt appealed his convictions, arguing among other points that they were not supported by sufficient evidence; that the admission of irrelevant and highly prejudicial evidence made his trial unfair; and that a law enforcement officer was improperly allowed to offer expert testimony on gun safety.
In a ruling issued last week, Ohio’s Fourth District Court of Appeals rejected all these arguments, as well as Platt’s claims that his trial attorney had been ineffective and that he had been improperly sentenced.
On the issue of insufficient evidence, Platt contended that the prosecution failed to establish that his conduct was the proximate cause of Spangler’s death, or that he had committed a felony by failing to lock his gun cabinet. He noted that Mason Platt has admitted he knew the combination to the lock on the cabinet, and therefore might have taken the gun out even if Donald Platt had not forgotten to lock it.
On this issue the appeals court agreed with the prosecution that Platt’s actions were a “substantial or contributing factor” in bringing about Spangler’s death. The court cited the facts that Platt had left the gun cabinet unlocked, with loaded weapons inside, and had left the three boys “largely unsupervised” while he was in another room most of the evening. Had he kept a closer eye on them, the fatal accident might not have happened, the court concluded.
The supposedly irrelevant and prejudicial evidence cited by Platt included a video showing Platt’s 11-year-old son repeatedly encouraging Spangler to kill himself; testimony by a law enforcement officer that there was a smell of marijuana in the house; testimony about Mason Platt vaping and making comments about “dabs,” a compound containing THC, the active ingredient in marijuana; testimony about other weapons available to the boys such as swords; and testimony about Platt’s own marijuana use and past opiate addiction.
Platt argued that none of this evidence had any relevance to proving either that he had left the gun cabinet unsecured, or that Mason Platt had taken a gun from the cabinet and accidentally shot Spangler, and that its potential to prejudice the jury against him outweighed any value it might have had in proving the state’s case against him.
The appellate court also rejected this line of argument, noting, first, that Platt’s defense attorney had not objected to the evidence being introduced during the trial. And even if for the sake of argument it were granted that the trial court should have excluded it, the appeals court found, “we do not believe that a manifest miscarriage of justice occurred.”
The court also reasoned that the evidence Platt objects to was not entirely irrelevant to the charges against him. Some of it, for example, helped show that Platt was not paying close enough attention to the boys’ behavior to keep them safe.
Then-Nelsonville Police Chief Scott Fitch testified at Platt’s trial about how he safely stores the weapons he keeps in his home. Based on the subject of his testimony, Platt maintained in his appeal, Fitch should have been required to qualify as an expert witness, or his testimony should have been excluded.
The appeals court found, however, that Fitch’s views on gun safety did not constitute expert testimony, but rather layman’s testimony on a topic that he knew something about as a gun owner and police officer.
Though the appellate court upheld Platt’s conviction, it also affirmed a decision by the trial court in May 2023 to grant Platt’s request for judicial release from prison, after he had served a little over a year of his sentence. The state had appealed the judicial release on the grounds that in granting it, the trial court had failed to specify the required factors for doing so. The appeals court concluded, however, that the trial court had “acted appropriately and conscientiously and satisfied the statutory requirements to grant a request for judicial release.”
In February 2023, Eli Spangler’s mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Athens County Common Pleas Court against Platt and the woman who owned the Walnut Street property where the fatal shooting took place, and which Platt was buying from the woman on a land contract. That suit was apparently settled, and the case was dismissed in August 2023.
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