After watching his wife's drug-dealing cousin repeatedly supply her with heroin and begging him to stay away from their Hamilton Township house, Edwin Sobony II snapped.
On Dec. 9, 2015,
Sobony grabbed an aluminum baseball bat from his garage and sent Larry Jewell to intensive care with skull fractures.
Sobony's attorney, Sam Shamansky, held the bat on Friday in a Franklin County courtroom and told jurors that he would have gone further.
"I’d pull out this bat and I’d beat him to death because that’s what he deserves," Shamansky said of the victim in a defiant closing argument.
"You come and mess with one of my family members and stick that poison in their veins ... I'm going to take pleasure in splitting your head open."
But the jurors weren't swayed by the claim that Sobony was defending himself or his wife. They deliberated for less than three hours before convicting the mail carrier of one count of felonious assault.
He could be sent to prison for a minimum of two years or a maximum of eight when he is sentenced on Nov. 2 by Common Pleas Judge Charles Schneider.
Assistant Prosecutor Lindsay Miller told the jury that she didn't like Jewell either, but that didn't make him any less of a victim.
"The laws of the state that protect each and every one of us also protect a heroin addict like him," she said in her closing argument. "You don't have to like (Jewell) to find the defendant guilty of felonious assault."
Sobony, 36, didn't testify, nor did his wife, Marie Sobony. The victim was called to the witness stand by the defense, but refused to answer questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
Jewell, 46, has a record of drug offenses and a pending drug-possession charge. Detectives from the sheriff's office identified him as a drug dealer during the trial.
Sobony told detectives that he saw Jewell with a knife before the beating, but later admitted that he planted a knife at the scene.
During a series of interviews with detectives,
he said Jewell frequently went to the couple's house, where they lived with their five children, to sell and do heroin with Mrs. Sobony. He said he once caught them with the drug in the bathroom of the house and that he repeatedly told Jewell to stay away.
On the day of the altercation, Sobony had stopped at a sheriff's office on Lockbourne Road asking for help. He was told that he could obtain a civil protection order against Jewell.
Instead, Miller told the jury, Sobony decided that the best approach was "to take a bat and solve the problem yourself."
Shamansky said that Sobony had run out of options and knew that his heroin-addicted wife could overdose before anyone intervened.
"How much time do you have before the next dose kills you?" he asked. "You don’t have any time."
Shamansky referred to Jewell as a "scumbag," "prick" and worse during his argument, and suggested that jurors would have done what his client did "if you had any sense of right and wrong."
After an objection from Miller, the judge told jurors,
"It's not about what you would do and it's not about what Mr. Shamansky would do."
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Originally Posted by Sister Miriam Godwinson
I don't get it.
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