Springfield man representing self in trial sentenced to prison

UPDATE @ 11:25 a.m. (May 15):

Ramon Boyce was sentenced to 70 years in prison during his sentencing Tuesday morning.

UPDATE @ 9:15 p.m. (May 11): Ramon Boyce has been convicted on all charges that could send him to prison for 67 years.

A Clark County Common Pleas jury returned its verdict before 8:30 p.m. Friday. The panel had been deliberating since about 2 p.m.

The indictment, on multiple counts of burglary, receiving stolen property and engaging in a pattern of corrupt behavior, “was originally calculated as if he had two prior convictions for enhancing purposes,” county Prosecutor Andrew Wilson said.

“One of those priors was reversed on appeal in the past so we had to amend [the charges in the indictment] to only reflect one prior [conviction],” Wilson said.

Boyce will be sentenced at a later date.

INITIAL REPORT

Closing arguments were held on Friday in a case involving a Springfield man representing himself while charged with a string of burglaries and facing more than 100 years in prison.

Ramon Boyce, 33, has been charged with 13 counts of burglary, six counts of receiving stolen property and one count of engaging in a pattern of corrupt behavior. Those burglaries happened from August 2016 to June 2017. He was secretly indicted by a Clark County Grand Jury in the summer of 2017.

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Boyce is defending himself because he wants to draw attention to certain parts of the trial, he said. This is not the first time he has done so. He has written an appeal that caused a conviction against him to be overturned.

Boyce brought up several things he found troubling during the three-week trial.

“This case has been trying. You know, the case has essentially received some properties beefed up to be burglaries, which no evidence suggests that. They are overlooking evidence such as DNA, fingerprints,” he said.

He claimed during closing arguments that evidence collected points away from him.

RELATED : Secret indictment accuses Springfield man of several burglaries

He also claimed prosecutors were misrepresenting facts. He made an example out of a witness statement.

“She later on had still shots of an individual carrying something or holding something. She clearly said that the person she saw had a goatee and he was dark-skinned,” Boyce said. “She said the person was not light skin or they were lighter because it would have glowed on her camera.”

Judge Douglas M. Rastatter halted his argument after he made the claim that Clark County Prosecutor Andrew Wilson was misleading.

“It’s OK if you want to argue that people are mistaken or even if you want to argue that they were lies but to suggest that Mr. Wilson put witnesses on the stand for that purpose is very troubling and absent of any evidence of that, you are not to say that again,” he said.

More than 90 people were called to testify and over 1,000 pieces of evidence was presented.

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