513-445-9600The Dayton Daily News featured the parents of Mitchell Simon, a 16-year-old honors student at Lakota West High School who was sentenced to nine years in prison for two counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of aggravated arson.
In October 2013, Simon tied his parents’ bedroom doors shut and lit fires outside both rooms. Simon was allegedly angry with his parents over his laptop being taken away, according to detectives.
Simon is appealing his sentence because he believed that he had a plea deal with a Butler County judge and prosecutors. Mitchell believes that his trial attorney indicated after talking with an assistant prosecutor and the judge that there was an agreement that if he pleaded guilty, he would get three years in prison or maybe community control.
Josh Engel, Mitchell Simon’s current attorney, said they are going to ask the Ohio Supreme Court to take the case, and they are hopeful to get a hearing about the issues of the plea agreement.
“My thought is can we have a hearing so that we don’t have to speculate what happened,” Engel said “We can air this in open court and find out what the truth was, and maybe it really wasn’t an injustice. Maybe it really was Mitchell who misunderstood, and he had an obligation to understand. And that’s on him. But we don’t know the answer. My strong feeling is if there has been an injustice, we should at least take the time to get to the bottom of it.”
The Ohio Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to take the case in January 2016.
