On August 12, 2025, Tyrone Noling’s legal team, made up of attorneys at the Ohio Innocence Project, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, and Sidley Austin LLP, filed a motion requesting a new trial for Mr. Noling, an Ohio man wrongfully convicted of the 1990 murders of Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig in Portage County, Ohio. The motion for a new trial is based on the prosecution’s withholding of exculpatory evidence in violation of Mr. Noling’s constitutional rights under Brady v. Maryland. Specifically, Mr. Noling’s legal team argues that the State of Ohio failed to disclose several key pieces of evidence that implicated at least two other individuals as suspects in the murders.
These key pieces of evidence include: (1) documentary evidence that inculpated a different individual, Dan Wilson, whom the State tried, convicted, and executed in 2009 for an unrelated 1991 aggravated murder conviction; (2) a 1991 report of testing of physical evidence from the crime scene that could not exclude Wilson (by contrast, that physical evidence was later shown definitively not to match Mr. Noling’s DNA); and (3) documentary evidence inculpating Dennis VanSteenberg, an individual first identified as a suspect and questioned by police immediately after the murders, and his father, Raymond VanSteenberg, whose sister-in-law reported to authorities that he had disposed of his .25 caliber pistol at the time of the Hartig murders, and then lied to police when they sought to compare what he misled them to believe was his gun to bullets from the same type of gun used in the Hartig murders.
At the time of his conviction and death sentencing in 1996, Mr. Noling was only 23 years old. There is no physical evidence linking Mr. Noling to the crime scene. Mr. Noling’s conviction rested largely on the testimony of his co-defendants, all of whom have since recanted their testimony. One of those co-defendants testified under oath that he had been coerced and threatened by Portage County investigators into implicating Mr. Noling. Because of the prosecution’s withholding of key exculpatory evidence, Mr. Noling’s jury never heard evidence pointing to other suspects that most likely would have changed the outcome of his conviction. In fact, one of the jurors from Mr. Noling’s original trial, Christine Richards, has come forward, as reported by the Akron Beacon Journal, to state that she now regrets voting to convict Mr. Noling after learning all of the available facts concerning his prosecution by Portage County attorneys.
Mr. Noling’s motion for a new trial was filed in the Court of Common Pleas in Portage County, Ohio, and seeks to put an end to almost 30 years of injustice Mr. Noling has suffered. The statements set forth in this release are based on that motion and its many supporting exhibits.
Shortly after the motion requesting a new trial was filed, Mr. Noling’s legal team also filed a motion to allow access to physical evidence for DNA testing. The physical evidence concerns ten .25 caliber cartridge casings and seven ring boxes recovered from the Hartigs’ home. Mr. Noling first filed an application for DNA testing of these items in 2010, but the application was denied because the State laboratory believed that the evidence was not scientifically suitable for testing. The motion to allow access argues that DNA testing technology has substantially improved over the past decade, particularly in obtaining profiles from spent cartridge casings and degraded samples of touch DNA. With these advancements in DNA technology, testing of these items could identify the genetic profile of the person(s) that murdered the Hartigs and provide further evidence of Mr. Noling’s innocence.
The Ohio Innocence Project team is led by attorney Brian Howe. The Weil team is led by partner Mark Perry, counsel Dan Nadratowski, and associate Rachael Jones. The Sidley Austin team is led by partner Eamon Joyce, and associates Sarah Eaton and Wendy Zheng.