By Randy Ludlow
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Arliss White lies in a prison hospital bed unable to care for himself, unable to even feed himself.
The Ohio Parole Board thinks that White deserves to be freed after 24 years in prison — even if his life on the outside is confined to a nursing home.
State prison officials maintain that he is incapable of harming anyone amid dementia and other complications from a series of strokes suffered since 1999.
However, those who hope to rescind White’s parole say that, regardless of the quality of his existence, he still possesses something precious taken from his victim — life.
They say that White, who will turn 57 next week, should remain in the Corrections Medical Center on the South Side serving his 25- to 50-year sentence.
White killed a bone-cancer survivor, shooting her during a 1987 robbery as she worked at a South Side drugstore to pay her medical bills. Those who loved Edith Marcum, who left behind four daughters at age 36, are asking the parole board to reverse its decision.
“He doesn’t deserve a second chance at life. The second chance my mother got, after everything she went through with cancer, he took it away from her,” said Joanna Marcum, 38, of the South Side.
The youngest of the four sisters, she was 13 when her mother was murdered.
White will go free unless the objections of the Marcum family and others persuade the full eight-member parole board to review his case and persuade some of the five members who back his release to change their minds.
On the night of Feb. 11, 1987, two masked gunmen entered the Rite Aid in the Great Southern Shopping Center. Edith Marcum was working at the register. Despite being told two years earlier that she had three months to live, she defied the odds and was working that night to help pay the price of saving her life.
The robbers instructed Marcum to open the safe. She didn’t know the combination. She had barely gotten out the words “I can’t” when one of the robbers fired a shot into her abdomen. Marcum died 13 hours later.
White was charged with aggravated murder, but jurors convicted him in late 1988 of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated robbery. His partner that night was later fatally shot during a drug deal in Arizona. The getaway driver told police that White was the triggerman in Marcum’s death.
Carlo LoParo, state prisons spokesman, said White is so ill that he was unable to participate in a video-conference parole hearing. White’s health was a factor in the decision to grant him parole, LoParo said. “Our resources are applied to individuals who need to be under supervision and restraint. He’s no physical threat to anyone.”
Joanna Marcum doesn’t care about White’s health. “The bottom line is, he killed my mother. I live with it every day, and I will live with it until I die.”
She thinks that the prison system is dumping White to duck the bills for his medical care. “Whether he’s in prison or outside, the taxpayers still will be paying for him. Let him stay where he is,” she said.
Prosecutors have written to the parole board opposing White’s release. Michael Miller, who was Franklin County prosecutor at the time White was convicted, wrote that the crime was “horrendous” and that White should serve his entire 50-year sentence. Michael Burns, the assistant county prosecutor who tried the case, wrote that White’s health should not be a factor in his release.
“Releasing Arliss White would reopen old wounds and cause needless suffering to a family that suffered such a terrible loss,” wrote Burns, now an assistant U.S. attorney in Columbus. His boss, U.S. District Attorney Carter M. Stewart, also signed the letter.
Add Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien, who handled a robbery case against White in the 1970s, to those campaigning to deny parole. “Despite his medical condition, he should remain in custody,” O’Brien said.
“I think he should die in prison for the crime he committed.”
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