Appeals court upholds two Trumbull County convictions
The Eleventh District Court of Appeals affirmed two Trumbull County criminal convictions this Monday, including an appeal in a 2021 murder case.
Conviction stands for Shamar Askew, 20, of Warren
Judges John Eklund, Matt Lynch and Eugene Lucci upheld the four convictions and 15-year-to-life prison sentence for defendant Shamar Askew, 20, of Warren.
Askew was charged in the February 2021 shooting death of 88-year-old Ruth Lewis.
He was sentenced Sept. 9, 2022 after pleading guilty to first-degree murder, murder, discharging a firearm into a habitation and tampering with evidence.
The appeal dealt with a charge that the trial court erred because “the guilty pleas may have been the product of being uninformed as to the decision of the trial court judge in either granting or denying (defense’s) motion to suppress his statements to law enforcement.”
However, the appellate judges decided this assignment to the trial court was without merit.
Conviction stands for Corey Hoffman, 24, of Southington
In a second appeal, the conviction and 54-month prison sentence of defendant Corey Hoffman was upheld by the Eleventh District Judges Eklund, Lynch and Lucci.
The 24-year-old defendant from Southington had pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicular assault and failure to stop after an accident, connected to a Sept. 19, 2021 traffic crash which injured a woman on a motorcycle.
Hoffman’s attorney John B. Juhasz had argued the sentence was excessive since the charges for a third-degree and fifth-degree felony.
“The trial court erred in imposing a sentence for a non-homicide offense that was disproportionate to the sentences being generally imposed for vehicular assault offenses.”
However the Eleventh District judges ruled the “appellant has not demonstrated that his sentence is so unusual as to be outside the mainstream of local judicial practice.”
Eklund also wrote: “A trial court is not required to give any particular weight or emphasis to a given set of circumstances.”
Trumbull County Assistant Prosecutor Ryan Sanders argued the case for the state before the Eleventh District judges.
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