Ohio | In a letter to the newspaper, he confessed to killing a prisoner. Now, he faces the death penalty

My name is Joel Drain. I am the person who killed him.

A month after writing those two sentences in a letter to an Ohio newspaper, Drain was indicted by a grand jury in Warren County. He was charged with aggravated murder and two other felonies. 

Now, he faces the death penalty, and his trial is scheduled to start today.

During a pretrial hearing in February, a public defender called Drain one of the most intelligent people he knows. So why did the 38-year-old confess to a crime in the newspaper?

“Beat him. Stabbed him. And strangled him," Drain wrote in July. "It's all black & white."

Drain was already serving a potential life sentence for the 2016 stabbing and strangling of a man in Northwest Ohio. Shortly before that, he had been arrested for stabbing his father.

Then, in April of 2019, Drain was accused of killing another inmate while incarcerated at the Warren Correctional Institution. Christopher Richardson, 29, was serving four years for aggravated arson when he was killed.

Warren County Prosecutor David Fornshell called Richardson's death a "blood bath." Drain beat Richardson with the motor from a desk fan, stomped on his throat and kicked a pencil into his head, the prosecutor told the Dayton Daily News.

"He tried to stand up for a known child molester. He was a snitch,” Drain wrote in his letter to the Columbus Dispatch. “I gave him what he deserved. No apologies.”

Before Drain was charged, he read an article in The Dispatch about the assault. Three months later, although Drain had been moved to a different prison, he had still not been charged. 

In his letter, the inmate with "unforgiven sin" tattoed below his lip said prosecutors and other authorities had been pointing to him as the killer behind the scenes for months. Drain said he wanted to get it all out in the open. 

And now, he wants to get the trial over with.

Drain has waived his right to a jury trial and, against the advice of his attorneys, is expected to plead no contest today. That means he is not admitting guilt, but admitting to the facts contained in his indictment.

But because this is a death penalty case, prosecutors still have to prove their case to a panel of three judges – who were selected earlier this year when a sheriff's deputy drew marbles out of a hat.

The trial in Warren County Common Pleas Court is scheduled to last two days. If the judges find him guilty, they will then decide if Drain should be put to death.

"Now you know the real story," he wrote in his letter last year.

"Respectfully," he signed it. "Joel Drain."

Source: cincinnati.com, Keith BieryGolick, May 17, 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