Among the new year’s possibilities, 2020 may see Ohio end its death penalty.
Reason One is that the state has run out of places to buy the substances specified for administering lethal injections. Reason Two is the colossal cost to taxpayers of defending in the appeals courts virtually every death sentence that Ohio metes out (with some of those costs for compensating public defenders representing, as is only right, Death Row inmates).
As to practicality and cost, two of Ohio’s most powerful leaders, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, and Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, a Republican from Perry County’s Glenford, have expressed serious concerns. The unavailability of execution drugs means, in practice, that Ohio is facing a de facto moratorium on executions.
Meanwhile, Householder said this in mid-December, the Columbus Dispatch reported: “We may have a law in place that allows for a death penalty that we can’t carry out. And the question is: Are the costs that are associated with that and retrials and all these things, at the end of the day, is it worth that?”
In the realm of the spirit, here’s what Pope Francis told the world’s Catholics in 2017, “No matter how serious the crime that has been committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person.” (As of January, Catholics represented about 16 percent of Ohio’s 11.7 million residents – about one in six – the Catholic Conference of Ohio reported.)
As for public opinion, Gallup said last month that while 56 percent of the Americans polled still favor the death penalty, “For the first time … a majority of Americans say that life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty is.”
There were 139 men and one woman on Ohio’s Death Row in November, according to the Rehabilitation and Correction Department. Of those inmates, 59 are white, 80 are black, and one is listed as “other.”
If four-term Republican Gov. James A. Rhodes (1963-70, 1975-82) had any opinion on the death penalty, it’s lost to memory. But except for two 1963 executions (in the electric chair in the old Ohio Penitentiary, where Columbus’s Arena District is), Ohio executed nobody else for 36 years. (Part of the reason: For four years in the 1970s, a U.S. Supreme Court decision imposed what amounted to a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty.)
In 1999, Ohio executed Wilford Berry Jr. by lethal injection. Berry, who had waived his right to any appeals, had been sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of his employer, Charles Mitroff, of Pepper Pike, the owner of a Fleet Avenue bakery. Of the 56 Death Row inmates, including Berry, whom Ohio has executed beginning 1999, the average time spent on Death Row was about 17 years and two months, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported in April.
No question, Ohio’s Death Row inmates have typically committed despicable crimes. That’s not an issue. Whether the death penalty deters murder isn’t an issue, either, because as a practical matter, a condemned convict cannot know if he or she will ever be executed, given lengthy legal appeals. (And juries do make mistakes, as injustice after injustice, especially against defendants of color, demonstrate.)
Everyone mourns the murder of someone who was loved. Survivors know that there is no penalty harsh enough to adequately punish a murderer. That’s what grief and loss do. And that’s 100 percent understandable and predictable. The quest to avenge an unspeakable wrong is one strand of human nature. But another strand of human nature is the quest for liberty.
If justice is the aim of the law, what is the just punishment for murder? Imprisoning a killer for life, without any hope of every walking free? Or condemning him or her to death at the point of a needle – something that as a practical matter may not happen – and ending that killer’s every worldly concern?
In courtroom after courtroom, what an Ohio death sentence may really mean is imprisonment for life – if you can call a that life – without any possibility of liberty. The question is whether Ohio should admit the reality of its death penalty, or, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars in legal fees, keep denying the obvious.
Source: cleveland.com, Opinions, T. Suddes, December 28, 2019. Thomas Suddes, a member of the editorial board, writes from Athens.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde