Ohio only state to execute more in 2010

Ted Strickland

Ohio continued to buck a national trend on the death penalty this year, ranking second in the nation to Texas in the number of executions.

Ohio had eight men lethally injected, making it the only state to increase executions in 2010, according to the annual report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Washington, D.C.

The total would have been higher had Gov. Ted Strickland not spared the lives of two convicted killers: Kevin Keith of Crawford County and Sidney Cornwell of Mahoning County.

Strickland, who will leave office Jan. 9, said yesterday that he feels "terrible" that Ohio was the only state in which executions rose this year. "It's one of the responsibilities of governing that I won't mind giving up," he said.

But Strickland also said that some murderers deserve the death penalty. "In a perfect world, we wouldn't have a death penalty," he said. "But there are some people who are so terribly damaged, so twisted and devoid of empathy for other people who, in the most calculated way, decide to do terrible things to people."

Executions in the United States in 2010 were down 12percent from last year, the center reported. The nation had 46 executions this year, down from 52 last year. This year's total was less than half of that in 1999, the report stated.

Texas had 17 executions this year, a 29percent drop from 2009.

Behind Ohio, four states - Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Virginia - each had three executions.

Only 12 states had any executions.

"Whether it's concerns about the high costs of the death penalty at a time when budgets are being slashed, the risks of executing the innocent, unfairness, or other reasons, the nation continued to move away from the death penalty in 2010," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The process has been complicated not only by legal challenges but also by shortages of a critical drug, thiopental sodium. It is used exclusively in Ohio's lethal-injection process and as part of a three-drug system in other states. The sole U.S. manufacturer of the drug does not expect to resume production until spring.

Although the nation's number of new death sentences has remained about the same, Ohio added six people to Death Row this year, an increase from the trickle of new sentences in the previous few years. Ohio has 156 men and one woman on Death Row.

Still, that is a big drop from just a few years ago, when more than 200 people were awaiting execution in Ohio prisons.

Ohio's steady stream of executions, coupled with a trend toward more sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole, has continued to trim Death Row.

Gov.-elect John Kasich, a Republican who supports capital punishment, will face reviewing two scheduled executions early in his term, in February and March.

In addition, county prosecutors have asked the Ohio Supreme Court to set execution dates in about 10 other cases. Dates are being held open monthly through the end of 2011.

Ohio is also going against a geographic trend. The center reported that, since capital punishment was restored in 1976, 82 percent of all executions in the U.S. have been in the South.

Source: The Columbus Dispatch, December 21, 2010