By Holly Zachariah
The Columbus Dispatch
CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — Michael Ferrara Jr. was just hours away from his release from prison when he was strangled inside his cell.
A jury deliberated about three hours yesterday before deciding that Logan Murphy, Ferrara’s cellmate and a convicted thief with a history of mental illness, did it. Murphy, 23, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but jurors rejected that defense and convicted him of aggravated murder in Ross County Common Pleas Court.
But Ferrara’s family blames someone else, too: The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. On Thursday, midway through Murphy’s trial, the family’s attorney filed a lawsuit in the Ohio Court of Claims against the state.
The lawsuit says that Ferrara had been picked on and sexually abused during his three years in prison and that the warden and corrections officers at Ross Correctional Institution and the prison system as a whole failed to protect him.
Ferrara, who was serving a sentence for burglary and other theft-related crimes in Cuyahoga County, was hours from his scheduled release on Jan. 11, 2013, when a guard found him unresponsive on the cell floor with Murphy on top of him. Murphy, in a videotaped confession that was played in court, said that Jesus and a Hell’s Angel named Mitch had instructed him to kill Ferrara to “send him to Jesus.”
Murphy, from the Canton area, admitted that he had lain in wait in the two-man cell until Ferrara got up and then attacked him and strangled him with a bedsheet.
That wing of the prison was considered a segregation unit, and Ferrara had been placed there to protect him from the violence of the general population. Murphy had been under mental-health watch, a prison psychologist testified, and had been hallucinating, hearing voices and growling at her during therapy sessions in the weeks before the attack.
He had been moved to Ferrara’s cell one day earlier.
Ross County Prosecutor Matt Schmidt said there was no doubt that Murphy is troubled. But an insanity defense requires more than just an official diagnosis.
“There was never any indication at all, regardless of whatever mental illness Logan Murphy has, that he did not know that what he was doing that day was wrong,” Schmidt said.
The lawsuit filed by the Ferrara family is based, in part, on the fact that the corrections officer in charge of that wing on the morning of the murder did not check on inmates as required.
Guards in that wing are supposed to check on each cell every 30 minutes, but trial testimony showed that the man on duty that night checked only sporadically and lied about it on his time log.
The guard committed suicide the day after the murder, but authorities have said there was no way to prove the two events were connected.
Still, in Michael Ferrara Sr.’s mind, the evidence is clear.
“Everyone failed my son,” he said. “Why was he put in a cell with such a violent man? It makes no sense.”
His lawsuit asks for the standard damages of at least $25,000 per claim.
A prisons department spokesman said it would not comment.
Ferrara Sr., from the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid, said his son had a long-troubled past, and that his drug addiction and his own mental illness had stripped him off his talents as a musician, cook, student and debater of current events.
At Murphy’s trial, Schmidt told jurors that just the fact that Ferrara Jr. had been in prison didn’t mean that he deserved to die.
“Regardless of their crime or what their sentence might be, the men inside these prison walls are still human beings,” he said. “The laws that protect all of us still apply to them.”
Ross County Common Pleas Judge Scott W. Nusbaum did not set a sentencing date for Murphy.