By Sharon Turco
The Cincinnati Enquirer

A convicted killer indicted Tuesday in the kidnapping and raping of a woman as she walked home from an Arlington Heights bar this month should still be in prison, said Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen.

Kelvin Willis, 33, of Dayton, Ohio, was released late last year after serving seven years of a nine-to-25-year sentence for an involuntary manslaughter conviction in Montgomery County.

Willis is at least the third convicted killer released from Ohio prisons before serving maximum prison terms to be accused of committing new crimes within the last year in Hamilton County. The three men were sentenced before Ohio law changed in 1996, making any imposed sentence mandatory:

• Edward Patterson, 53, was convicted in 1973 of armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and murder in Hamilton County, and sentenced to life in prison. He was paroled in 1996, according to the Ohio Department of Corrections. Seven months later, he robbed a Clifton store at gunpoint. He was convicted last September on two charges of robbery and sentenced to spend 12 years in prison.

• Charles Calvert, 50, was convicted in 1973 of committing unarmed robbery and murder in Cuyahoga County and sentenced to serve life in prison. He was paroled in 1988. In May, he was charged with violating a temporary protection order. A trial on the felony charge is set for Aug. 6. He remains free on his own recognizance.

State legislators passed a truth-in-sentencing law in 1996 that set definite, and often shorter, prison terms.

Canton attorney Norman Sirak filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners sentenced prior to the 1996 change in state sentencing guidelines, arguing that those inmates are serving longer sentences than their counterparts sentenced after 1996.