Ohio parole board rejects Alva Campbell's mercy request

The Ohio Parole Board on Friday rejected a request for mercy from a condemned inmate who argues he had such a bad childhood and is in such poor health that he should be spared from execution next month.

The board's 11-1 decision came in the case of Alva Campbell, set to die by lethal injection on Nov. 15 for killing a teen during a 1997 carjacking. The slaying came 5 years after he was paroled on a different murder charge.

Republican Gov. John Kasich has the final say.

The board concluded that Campbell's upbringing and childhood experiences "were certainly dysfunctional and no doubt traumatic" but must be weighed against the circumstances of his crime. The board also cited the fact that he had been responsible for 2 killings, among other offenses.

"Those murders and other crimes committed by Campbell over the course of many years reflect a disturbing propensity to engage in extreme and senseless violence, a propensity that never abated despite multiple incarcerations and attempts by the state to rehabilitate him," the board said.

The board member who supported clemency concluded that Campbell's "unstable, inhumane living conditions" as a child were made worse by his eventual removal from the home and that that was never fully considered by the courts.

Campbell's attorneys say he uses a walker, relies on an external colostomy bag, requires 4 breathing treatments a day for asthma and emphysema and may have lung cancer.

Campbell, 69, also should be spared because he was the product of a violent, dysfunctional and sexually abusive childhood and continued to suffer abuse after he was placed in foster homes, his attorneys said earlier this month.

"Alva's development suffered, and the chances of him becoming a responsible adult withered," lead attorney David Stebbins, a federal public defender, wrote in a filing with the parole board.

Campbell was paroled in 1992 after serving 20 years for killing a man in a Cleveland bar. On April 2, 1997, Campbell was in a wheelchair feigning paralysis when he overpowered a Franklin County sheriff's deputy on the way to a court hearing on several armed robbery charges, records show.

Campbell took the deputy's gun, carjacked 18-year-old Charles Dials and drove around with him for several hours before shooting him twice in the head as Dials crouched in the footwell of his own truck, according to court records.

Franklin County prosecutor Ron O'Brien opposes mercy and calls Campbell "the poster child for the death penalty."

O'Brien said it was ironic Campbell was raising health concerns to avoid execution given that he faked paralysis to carry out his crime.

"As judgment day nears he again resorts to ill health as a reason to enable an escape from his capital sentence - and should not be permitted to do so," O'Brien said in a filing with the parole board earlier this month.

O'Brien also dismissed Campbell's claims about his upbringing.

"It is easy to blame deceased parents or a childhood for mistakes or even crimes - but not for 2 separate murders committed decades apart," O'Brien said.

Other inmates across the country have cited ill health as a way to avoid execution. Some have been successful, including Vernon Madison, a 66-year-old Alabama inmate with stroke-induced dementia, who was spared because he didn't understand his death sentence or remember the killing.

But many others have not had the same success, including double killer Richard Cooey, from Ohio, who was executed in 2008 despite arguing that his obesity would prevent humane lethal injection because viable veins in his arms were difficult to find.

Source: The Tribune, October 20, 2017

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