The defense team of the man accused in the murder of Aliza Sherman has asked that the case be dismissed, claiming the document used to charge him isn’t a legal indictment and claiming that the state of Ohio has committed “outrageous government misconduct that occurred before the grand jury.”

Gregory Moore’s attorneys, Joseph and Megan Patituce of Patituce and Associates, which has multiple offices in Ohio, submitted the 749-page filing on Oct. 20. The two were retained by Moore following withdrawal from the case of former lead attorney, Jon Paul Rion of Rion & Rion, L.P.A., Inc. in Dayton, citing sensitive material in the proposed filing.

On Oct. 21, Michael C. O’Malley, Prosecuting Attorney for Cuyahoga County, filed a motion requesting that the court strike Moore’s motion to dismiss the case from the record because it said the move is “without merit.”

“Moore has once again filed a pretrial motion to dismiss after the deadline set by the Court,” the motion said. “He neither sought leave to file an untimely motion nor requested relief from waiver. Instead, Moore attempts to circumvent the waiver imposed. ...by recasting his claim as ‘failure to show jurisdiction in the court or to charge an offense.’ But Moore expressly concedes this Court has subject matter jurisdiction over the case and the indictment charges legally cognizable offenses. His actual objections concern alleged defects in the manner the indictment was obtained or prepared, which the Ohio Supreme Court has unequivocally held does not implicate the Court’s jurisdiction. Nor do those alleged defects demonstrate the indictment fails to charge an offense.”

In the Oct. 22 reply brief by Moore’s defense, his attorneys said they are not arguing that the court lacks jurisdiction, but that the cases cited by the prosecution involved defendants who challenged their indictments years after being convicted through appeals or other post-conviction legal proceedings.

O’Malley argued that Moore had “repeated opportunities to examine the indictment and raise objection to its form before the Court’s deadline expired” as he had known about the facts since the inception of the case.

He said that “Moore fails to identify any newly discovered information or previously unavailable evidence that would explain his failure to raise his allegations within the temporal limits set by this Court,” and that law says that objections based on defects in an indictment need to be raised within the court’s deadline unless the indictment fails to show jurisdiction in the court or fails to charge an offense, neither of which are true in the case.

O’Malley said in the motion that the court has previously stricken a defense filing “pleading for failure to comply with its filing deadlines,” and it should do so again.

On Oct. 22, the Patituces filed a reply brief to the strike request, saying it opposes the motion and arguing the motion to dismiss could not have been filed by the deadline, May 1, 2026, because it didn’t receive the grand jury transcripts until June 11, 2026; and that other crucial events, like a state Bureau of Criminal Investigation report, state filings of discovery submissions and new attorneys entering the case, made the deadline impossible to meet.

“The question here is not simply limited to the admissibility of just one piece of evidence but whether there is a grand jury finding behind the charges at all – in other words, does this Court have a valid indictment with valid charges at all, because if it does not, the Court does not have the authority to seat a petit jury and hear the case,” they wrote.

In the Oct. 20 motion, the defense claimed that the state failed to obtain a “constitutionally and statutorily valid indictment” against Moore and, as a result, failed to “charge him with an offense or obtain the constitutionally required authorization to move forward with the criminal process.”

They allege that because the document, filed May 2, 2025, reads “Draft Indictment” on each of the pages instead of saying “A True Bill,” a formal decision by a grand jury that the prosecution has provided enough evidence to show probable cause that a crime was committed, there is no legal grounds for the trial to move forward.

“Our Ohio Constitution requires that a proper indictment be returned with the grand jury’s finding before a matter may proceed and here it does not carry the grand jury’s finding that this is a true bill indictment,” the motion said. “The finding of true bill is a necessary step that cannot simply be ignored or shrugged off as a typo because here not only does the standard county form read ‘Draft Indictment for,’ the words ‘Draft Indictment’ appear at the top of every single page of the indictment.”

The defense said that three earlier indictments against Moore from 2013, 2015 and 2016 were labeled “A True Bill Indictment,” while in this one, “the finding of ‘A true bill’ appears nowhere on the document to evidence what the grand jury found.”

The Patituces said that in the motion that by calling it a “draft indictment,” there is no evidence that the grand jury actually returned a true bill indictment” because the grand jury’s vote is secret and “the State has nothing but the document itself to show what, if anything,” the grand jury found.

The defense argued that prosecutors have “spent the last eighteen months proceeding on a document that it did not have the authority to proceed on” and in that time “repeatedly violated Mr. Moore’s constitutional rights, denigrated counsel, outrageously accused Attorney Ian Friedman of criminal misconduct, constantly violated its own discovery and motion deadlines when it made forty-three separate supplemental discovery filings after the February 1, 2026, deadline, attempted to bypass this Court’s taint team order, attempted to threaten the defense expert with protracted legal difficulties if the expert did not immediately comply with the prosecutor’s demands, all while not even having secured a real valid indictment.”

The defense also argued the grand jury was shown “false and misleading” information about “how Mr. Moore supposedly sent text messages with his phone off, whether his phone was off at all, who the co-conspirator was, whether Sanford Sherman had been ruled out, and what happened to the video that should have shown the murder.” Sherman, Aliza Sherman’s husband, died in July 2024.

Prosecutors have said that Moore disconnected from his Verizon network and used a mobile hotspot to continue to send and receive text messages at the time of Sherman’s murder, but the defense argues in the Oct. 20 motion that “The State has since told this court that it ‘discovered the existence of the line and the activity thereon too late to obtain the precise records’ that would show whether any of the hotspot’s March 2013 usage ‘occurred on March 24th.’

It also said that the BlackBerry device used by Moore would not have been able to use Verizon Message+, which would allow messages to be sent without cell service through a Wi-Fi connection.

The Patituces claimed that Verizon records show that 25 texts were sent from or delivered to Moore’s phone during the time period the phone was allegedly off, which would contraindicate it being not on.

The defense also questioned whether prosecutors properly ruled out Sanford Sherman, whom she was in the process of a divorce with, as a suspect, arguing that the man allegedly “did not disclose to law enforcement about having multiple cell phones and that a list of the devices attributed to him has not been able to be completed.”

The Patituces further cite a supplemental Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation report that he claims “excluded” Moore and Kenneth Shepherd as “contributors to the DNA mixtures,” the reports of which were emailed to prosecutors six weeks before the grand jury’s meeting about his indictment.

Prosecutors have previously told the court that surveillance video at the location of Aliza Sherman’s murder was “compromised and not reliable” and that “there is no guarantee that the video, if it recorded the murder (it skipped two to three seconds at a time and 21 continuous minutes were missing from the sample collected by CPD), would be watchable due to the sun wash in the background,” according to the motion. But the defense argues that “the recorder was fast, not slow. On the State’s own measurement, the missing minutes ran from about 3:24 to 3:45 p.m. That was before Ms. Sherman left Beachwood at 3:54 p.m. and nearly two hours before the attack. The portion of the recording covering 5:22 p.m., about 6:17 p.m. on the recorder, was never collected.”

Moore’s defense team is requesting that Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Kira Krivosh order to privately “review” the grand jury records, “conduct an evidentiary hearing if this Court deems it appropriate, dismiss the indictment, and award attorney fees incurred by Mr. Moore being forced to defend himself after being arrested following the issuance of a document that is not a true bill indictment.”

In the Oct. 22 reply brief, Moore’s defense said their motion “presents a legitimate question about whether a grand jury found the charges on which Mr. Moore is to be tried for aggravated murder, and it rests on a transcript this Court reviewed in camera and released. It is possible that the State and prior counsel did not notice that the document was titled ‘draft indictment’ and that the grand jury never entered a finding of true bill, but for the system to work the participants have to have the courage and integrity to own their mistakes.

“Here, the State clearly made a disastrous mistake with the draft indictment not returning a true bill finding but rather than addressing it and making sure that there is a real indictment with a real finding, it attempts a sleight of hand by asking this Court to strike the motion so that there is never any review of what happens in this Court and that is not just, and it is not justice for anyone.”

Krivosh has not yet ruled on the motion as of Oct. 22.

Motion to set deadlines

On Oct. 22, Moore’s attorneys motioned to ask for more time to review evidence and for permission to file additional legal motions after the passage of the original deadlines, arguing that Ohio law does not require the state to produce voluminous electronic discovery in a format that the defense can easily search through.

“This means that where the State has produced hundreds of thousands of pages in a format that is not readily searchable, new counsel bears the burden of manual review,” the motion said. “This practical reality reinforces the argument that the interest of justice requires additional time: new counsel cannot file meaningful motions to suppress, challenge the indictment, or seek other legitimate remedies without first completing a thorough review of the discovery record.”

The defense said that setting new deadlines when new counsel appears on the case is “appropriate.”

Krivosh has not yet ruled on the motion as of Oct. 22.

Motion to compel

On Oct. 20, Moore’s defense also filed a motion to ask the court to order the state of Ohio to keep and turn over several pieces of evidence surrounding the indictment; email data and attachments for prosecutor’s request to Cleveland police video analyst Tom Ciula; communications between lead prosecutor Kevin Filiatraut and any attorney, employee or agent of the plaintiff in the Sherman estate’s civil lawsuit against Moore; and any form of communications between Filiatraut and Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Special Agent Lindsay Mussell involving Moore’s criminal trial.

The next day, Filiatraut asked the court to deny the request, arguing nothing the defense is seeking “discoverable” under law and that the defense has never formally or informally requested any of the information listed prior to now, which makes one wonder why they are asking for this Court to grant a motion to compel.

“None of these items have been withheld from the defense because the law does not require their production,” it said. “Finally, Moore’s motion requests said items in an inflammatory manner meant to poison the jury pool in this case.”

Krivosh has not yet ruled on the motion as of Oct. 22.

January 2027 trial date motion

Prosecutors filed a motion on Oct. 9 asking that a January 2027 start date be set for the trial, and on Oct. 16, Moore’s defense replied to the brief, opposing the January 2027 start date, arguing that since the Patituces did not take on the case until Sept. 28, the state is asking them to “try, in as little as fourteen weeks, an aggravated murder case that the State itself spent more than a decade preparing, despite the more than 235,000 pages of discovery it amassed during its thirteen-year investigation.”

“The State’s request is not serious and rather seems designed more to get an April 2027 trial date that its lead prosecutor suggested in an email to counsel,” the motion said. “The State asks this Court to do what the Sixth Amendment forbids: force Mr. Moore to trial with counsel who has not had the time to investigate the case, review the evidence or prepare a defense, and in doing so render that counsel ineffective before a single juror is even seated. The State knows better than anyone how much time this case requires, because the State was not ready to try it the first time around.”

Krivosh has not yet ruled on the motion as of Oct. 22.

This is a developing story. To follow the CJN’s extensive coverage of this story, visit cjn.org/sherman.