John Jefferson
Sydney Powell and her mother, Brenda Powell (Summit County Sheriff’s Office:Akron Children’s Hospital)
Prosecutors in Ohio are asking the state supreme court to overturn an appellate court ruling that vacated a murder conviction for a 24-year-old woman in one of the most high-profile trials the state has seen in years, asserting that the case is of “great constitutional importance” to the state’s criminal justice system.
The Summit County Prosecutor’s Office last week asked the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn a ruling from the Ninth District Court of Appeals that reversed the conviction of Sydney Powell. Powell, in September 2023, was found guilty of beating her mother with a cast iron skillet before fatally stabbing her more than two dozen times.
Powell had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges that she murdered her mother, Brenda Powell, to prevent her from finding out that Powell had been suspended from college.
The appeals court in December 2024 reversed Powell’s 2023 trial court conviction, reasoning that the trial court judge denied Powell the chance to present “sur-rebuttal expert testimony” to questions that were raised when Powell’s attorney was cross-examining a doctor who testified as an expert witness for the State. (A surrebuttal is a legal response to a rebuttal).
“The Ninth District Court of Appeals reversed Appellee Sydney Powell’s murder conviction based on its erroneous conclusion that she had the ‘unconditional right’ to present sur-rebuttal expert testimony that was cumulative to the extensive expert testimony she already elicited in her case-in-chief,” prosecutors wrote in the petition to the high court. “[T]he the Ninth District broke with more than a century of precedent, vacated a murder conviction entered by a jury after hearing extensive testimony during an eight-day trial, and issued inaccurate guidance to trial courts suggesting that criminal defendants have an unconditional right to present sur-rebuttal evidence whenever they assert an affirmative defense.”
A jury in September 2023 found Powell guilty on two counts of murder — special felonies, one count of second-degree felonious assault, and one count of third-degree tampering with evidence. Summit County Common Pleas Court Judge Kelly McLaughlin subsequently ordered her to serve 15 years to life in a state correctional facility.
Powell, who presented testimony from three expert witnesses at trial, appealed her conviction on grounds that McLaughlin was wrong to prevent her from presenting an additional expert witness to rebut the lone expert who testified for the prosecution.
The three expert witnesses who testified for Powell concluded that she was “unable to engage in any reasoning or conscious thought” during her mother’s murder, testifying that she was “completely totally out of her mind” and “untethered from the world as we all know it.”
The State’s expert, Dr. Silvia O’Bradovich, testified that Powell was sane at the time of the crime. However, she also went beyond the question of Powell’s sanity by offering a “pointed critique” of Powell’s experts and their “fundamentally flawed” methodologies. When Powell moved to rebut the doctor’s testimony, McLaughlin denied the motion “based solely on the conclusion that there had been ‘lots and lots and lots of expert testimony in this matter,’” the appellate court said, finding that McLaughlin’s ruling was an abuse of discretion.
In overturning the conviction, the appellate judge reasoned that because Powell could not “preemptively counter” those arguments from the State’s expert, she had an “unconditional right to present rebuttal testimony.”
Prosecutors asserted to the supreme court that the ruling’s “erroneous reasoning” was a stark departure from “well-established precedent” that could have a major impact on criminal trials going forward.
“This murder case, heard by a jury of Powell’s peers over the span of two weeks, is a matter of great public and general interest. The Ninth District’s erroneous decision not only undoes the deliberative work of those jurors but also has the potential to serve as a vehicle to entirely rewrite the order of trials throughout the State of Ohio,” the filing states. “In sum, the Ninth District’s decision contravenes more than a century of authority, will lead trial courts astray, and transform trials in Lorain, Medina, Summit, and Wayne Counties to an endless sequence of rebuttal and sur-rebuttal.”
The murder
As Law&Crime previously reported, prosecutors at trial argued that Powell attacked her mother because Powell had been suspended from attending Mount Union University due to poor academic performance, a secret she did not want her mother to learn about.
At the time of the slaying, Brenda Powell — a child-life specialist at Akron Children’s Hospital Showers Family Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders — was on the phone with Associate Dean of Students Michelle Gaffney and Dean of Students John Frasier.
Associate Dean Gaffney testified about what happened while they were on the phone with Powell’s mom.
“The phone cut off at some point after, I would say, somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven of those thudding, those sort of thud sounds, and the screaming had continued,” he said, according to a report from NBC News.
The line cut out, so Gaffney and Frasier called back, and another woman picked up the phone, claiming that she was Brenda Powell.
“The voice on the other end said, ‘Yes, this is Brenda. Yes, this is Brenda,’ “Gaffney testified. “It was not Brenda. I was sure it was Sydney. Both Dean Frasier and I looked at each other and sort of shook our heads at each other and said that’s not Brenda. He then said, ‘Sydney, I think this is you. This is not Brenda.’ The phone [then] went dead.”
The two school administrators called law enforcement and requested a welfare check on the Powell household.
Powell’s attorneys argued that she was a diagnosed schizophrenic amid a psychotic break when she attacked her mother and should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Her defense team called three psychiatrists who concurred with this notion, but prosecutors called their clinical psychologist, who testified that Powell’s actions did not align with the actions of someone having a psychotic break.
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