Travis Soto was indicted by a Putnam County grand jury in August of 2016 on charges of aggravated murder and other offenses related to the 2006 death of his young son, Julio.
The Lima News file photo
OTTAWA — A scheduled pre-trial hearing in the murder case of Travis Soto, which has bounced through the appeals process for more than six years, failed to materialize Thursday in Putnam County Common Pleas Court as attorneys huddled behind closed doors to map out how to get the case back on track.
Soto was indicted by a Putnam County grand jury in August of 2016 on charges of aggravated murder and other offenses related to the 2006 death of his young son, Julio.
He told police in 2006 he had accidentally killed his son in an all-terrain vehicle accident. The Napoleon man eventually pleaded guilty to child endangering and served a five-year prison sentence.
In 2016, several years after the completion of that sentence, Soto walked into the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office and confessed he had actually beaten his son to death and had staged the ATV accident. He was indicted on new charges of aggravated murder, murder, felonious assault, kidnapping and tampering with evidence, but Soto’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss all counts on double-jeopardy grounds, which prevents someone from being tried for the same crime twice.
The trial court denied the motion, which was then appealed to the Third District Court of Appeals. The appellate court agreed with the defendant that a subsequent prosecution was barred in the existing circumstances on double-jeopardy grounds. But in a 6-1 opinion, the Supreme Court of Ohio reversed the appeals court, holding that because the involuntary-manslaughter charge was dismissed as part of a plea bargain before a jury was empanelled, jeopardy never attached to that charge.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Soto’s case, and in August of this year the Sixth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati agreed with the Ohio Supreme Court that the double-jeopardy clause of the U.S. Constitution does not bar Soto from facing the current charges, effectively returning the matter back to the Putnam County courtroom of Judge Keith Schierloh.
Schierloh said a Dec. 21 pre-trial hearing would likely be scheduled following Thursday’s closed-door discussions.
