One of the fastest-growing trends in the Ohio judicial system is the sentence of life in prison without parole, adding momentum to a move away from the death penalty.
While some are pleased with the shift away from executions, which are costly to take to trial and uphold, others say that life without parole has its own drawbacks: It doesn’t allow for the possibility that offenders can change.
The number of Ohio inmates sentenced to life in prison without parole has jumped by 150 %, from 283 in 2010 to 703 through February.
“The rise of life without parole has gone unnoticed in Ohio,” said Ashley Nellis, a senior analyst at the Sentencing Project, a research organization in Washington, D.C., that seeks criminal justice reform and fairness in sentencing. “I’ve been stunned to see how fast it has increased.”
Ohio is far from alone. A report last month by the Sentencing Project says life without parole is the fastest-growing type of life sentence in the country. It coincides with the drop in the number of death-penalty cases.
In 2010, Ohio prosecutors filed 73 indictments seeking execution, according to records filed with the Ohio Supreme Court. Last year, they filed 19, a drop of 74 % in that time span.
In 1990, at the height of the push for the death penalty and the nation’s get-tough approach on crime, prosecutors brought 173 indictments.
The decline of death-penalty indictments and the spike in the number of life without parole sentences appears to have a moral component.
“Life without parole has become the sentence that jurors are more comfortable with,” said Kevin Werner, policy director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center. “It is more preferable than the death penalty. We are realizing that mistakes can be made.”
Michael Benza, a senior instructor at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, agreed: “If a person is sentenced to life without parole and a mistake is made, we can fix it. We can’t fix mistakes after an execution.”
Striking numbers in Cuyahoga
The numbers are even more striking in Cuyahoga County, which leads the state in inmates sentenced to life without parole with more than 110. Judges in the state’s 2 other largest counties, Franklin and Hamilton, have sentenced inmates to about 70 each.
The
Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said 22 inmates were executed in the United States last year. By comparison, 98 were put to death in 1999, the most in recent years.
Death sentences in Ohio 1983 to 2019
Death sentences have been on the decline in the state.
Ohio last executed an inmate in June 2018, when it put to death Robert Van Hook, a Cincinnati killer convicted of aggravated murder in the stabbing death of his neighbor.
The state has given its 140 inmates on death row a reprieve because it cannot come up with the drugs needed for lethal injection, which is the only way Ohio law permits an inmate to be executed. Cuyahoga County has 24 inmates on death row.
In part, Ohio county prosecutors say they have moved away from the death penalty because of costs, which can reach $3 million for one case because of years of trial public defender fees, incarceration, expert reports, and the state and federal appeals process.
The financial strain is more than many smaller counties can handle. In the case of the slayings of eight family members in Pike County, the Ohio Attorney General’s office allocated $1.1 million to take four people to trial on charges that could result in the death penalty.
The 4 — Billy Wagner, his wife Angela and their sons George and Jake — are being held in jail pending their trials. Their cases are not expected to go to trial until late this year or next. The victims, eight members of the Rhoden family, were killed in 2016.
The imposition of life without parole is nearly as costly, especially considering that as inmates age, the costs to care for them increases dramatically.
This year, in Ohio, those inmates will cost taxpayers nearly $20 million. Officials estimate that the costs will begin hitting taxpayers harder when the large number of younger inmates begin to age in the next 30 to 40 years.
Take Yaphet Bradley.
He shot and stabbed Miriam Johnson, 31, the mother of his three children, and hid her body in an abandoned home near East 74th Street in Cleveland in 2018. He pleaded guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole last year.
Bradley is 37. It will cost taxpayers more than $1.2 million to house, feed and provide medical services to him if he reaches the age of 80, according to interviews, prison records and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
‘An asset, not a drain’
Nationally, more than 53,000 inmates are serving life without parole. That’s up from 33,793 in 2003, according to the Sentencing Project, which takes issue with the sentence.
“Life without parole is unnecessary,” senior analyst Nellis said. “People age out of their crimes. They can become assets, not drains. I’m not naïve. It doesn’t happen in every case, but it can happen.”
Others aren’t convinced.
Law enforcement officials say the sentence is vital to keeping the state’s most violent predators behind bars and away from residents.
Timothy McGinty, a retired Cuyahoga County judge and prosecutor, called life without parole an option that must be considered in heinous homicide cases. In fact, he was a promoter of it while in office.
“It is a half-inch below the death penalty,” McGinty said.
He said he favors the death penalty for certain cases, including the most violent, abhorrent crimes, where authorities are certain that a person is guilty and that the case can stand up to years of appeals.
Prosecutors and judges have pushed for life in prison without parole in some circumstances, including to prevent victims or their families from dealing with the strain of appeals that come with a death penalty case.
In September, Jonathan Mann wrote an opinion column on the death penalty for The Columbus Dispatch. In it, he discussed how Thomas Knuff had recently been sentenced to death for killing Mann’s father, John, in Parma Heights in 2017.
Mann wrote, “The death penalty shifts attention and resources from people who really need it: the victims’ families.
“Instead of spending money on a death sentence, the state needs to discuss and fund ways for people like me to heal.”
Source: cleveland.com, Staff, March 22, 2020
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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
