After nearly 15 years on the bench as a Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge, there aren’t many firsts left for Mark Serrott.
But on Thursday, Serrott granted a new trial for a man who had been found guilty of murder by a jury in May.
LaRoy Robinson , 49, had been scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in the Dec. 2 death of 46-year-old Malik Islam .
“This court in a 14½-year tenure as a judge in hundreds of jury trials, has never overturned a jury verdict,” Serrott wrote in his decision. “This case is the rare exceptional case where justice requires a new trial.”
On May 31, a jury had found Robinson not guilty of purposefully killing Islam, but found Robinson guilty of killing Islam during a felonious assault, discharging a firearm near prohibited premises and felonious assault.
Evidence presented at Robinson’s trial showed that around 12:10 a.m. on Dec. 2, Robinson was sitting in a parked car on the 2000 block of Cornell Avenue on the city’s Northeast Side. Islam approached Robinson and was verbally aggressive towards Robinson.