Whether or Not Ohio Ever Carries Out Another Execution Will Help Shape the Death Penalty’s Fate Across the Nation

On February 13, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine postponed the three Ohio executions that were scheduled for 2025. And he predicted that no one would be put to death during the remainder of his time in office which ends in 2026.

Columbus’s NBC4 reports that “the reprieves were issued due to ‘ongoing problems involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC), pursuant to DRC protocol, without endangering other Ohioans.’”

That other death penalty states have solved their drug supply problems suggests that there may be more going on in Ohio than is suggested in DeWine’s explanation of his decision to postpone executions. Given the size of the state’s death row and its long death penalty history, what happens in Ohio will reverberate well beyond its borders.

Even in the deep red Buckeye State, there is little appetite for turning death sentences into deaths. That may be why, since DeWine took office five years ago, Ohio has not carried out a single execution.

The three people whose executions DeWine delayed include Percy Hutton, who was sentenced for a murder he committed in 1985. His execution has been pushed back to 2028.

The second man, Samuel Moreland, was to be executed on July 30 for a crime he committed forty years ago. Like Hutton, he is now scheduled to be put to death in 2028.

The third man, Douglas Coley, has a new execution date of August 15, 2028. He was convicted and sentenced for a 1997 carjacking and murder.

There are more than one hundred people awaiting execution in Ohio, two of whom are women. Its death row population is the sixth largest in the country. 59% of that group are racial minorities.

Ohio ranks eighth among death penalty states in terms of the percentage of minority group members among those awaiting execution.

In recent years, the pace of death sentencing in the state has slowed to a trickle. It had only one new death sentence in 2024.

It was handed down in May in the case of Gurpreet Singh, who was charged with murdering his wife and three of her relatives. Before that, the last death sentence in the state was in 2020, when Joel Drain was convicted of murdering another inmate at the Warren Correctional Institution.

Looking over the period from 1977 to 2013 (the last date for which data is available) shows that Ohio’s death sentence/per capita ratio was .0286, the fifteenth highest among states retaining capital punishment.

While Mike DeWine has imposed a de facto moratorium on executions, he has never come out as a death penalty abolitionist. The closest he came was in 2019 after a federal district court ruled that Ohio’s execution protocol “will almost certainly subject [prisoners] to severe pain and needless suffering.”

The court found that they would be exposed to a “drowning sensation produced by the first drug in the protocol, Midazolam” and a “burning sensation caused by the third, heart-stopping drug because Midazolam doesn’t have the pain-killing properties that drugs such as opioids do.”

At the time, DeWine said, “Ohio is not going to execute someone under my watch when a federal judge has found it to be cruel and unusual punishment.” The governor did not change course even after an appellate court reversed the trial court’s decision.

By putting executions on hold, DeWine has shown Ohioans that they can live without them. The longer Ohio goes without an execution, the more time citizens have to get used to living without it.

Now, six and one-half years after Ohio’s last execution, the sky has not fallen. More to the point, the rate of violent crime is almost exactly what it was in 2018.

In addition, as the state’s Legislative Budget Office notes, “Ohio’s violent crime rate has remained consistently below the national average over the past ten years. In 2022, compared to the national average, Ohio’s violent crime rate was nearly 23% lower.”

Ohio’s death penalty is plagued with the kind of problems that are found across the nation, racial disparity being one of them. The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) notes that “[m]ultiple Ohio-specific studies have concluded that when a case involves a white victim — especially a white female victim — defendants are more likely to receive a death sentence or be executed.”

One study of executions in the state between 1976 and 2014 found that homicides involving white female victims are “six times more likely to result in an execution than homicides involving Black male victims.” A DPIC analysis of Ohio’s death penalty found that “75% of death sentences” in the state “were for cases with at least one white victim.”

It added that “most murder victims in the state are Black (66%).”

In addition, more than a decade ago, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio and the President of the Ohio State Bar Association created a task force to review the administration of Ohio’s death penalty. It recommended

specialized trainings for judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys to recognize and protect against racial biases; requiring judges to report state actors who act on the basis of race in a capital case; removing death penalty specifications that are disproportionately applied to Black defendants; creating a death penalty charging committee at the Ohio Attorney General’s Office; and enacting legislation allowing for racial disparity claims to be raised and developed in state court through a Racial Justice Act.

As DPIC notes, “none of the specific recommendations to reduce racial disparities in death penalty cases have been adopted.”

Moreover, in April 2024, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost released the office’s annual “Capital Crimes Report.” The report called the state’s death penalty system “broken” and “enormously expensive.”

It estimated that “the extra cost of imposing the death penalty…on the 119 people currently on Death Row might range from $121 million to $363 million.” The report called that “a stunning amount of money to spend on a program that doesn’t achieve its purpose.”

In no uncertain terms, it delivered Its verdict. “Even if Ohio’s system is trustworthy in its sentencing decisions, it is not trustworthy in carrying them out…. This system,” the report explained, “is a testament to government impotence.

“At a time when faith in society’s institutions is at an all-time low, the failure of the capital-punishment system could be Exhibit A.” The report concluded that “If we were starting from scratch to design a system for the ultimate punishment—whether that punishment is execution or, instead, life in prison without parole—neither death-penalty opponents nor death-penalty supporters would create anything like Ohio’s current system, which produces churn, waste, and endless lawsuits but nothing else.”

That is why surveys have found that most Ohioans are ready to leave the death penalty behind. In September 2023, 56% said that the state should “do away with the death penalty and replace it with a life sentence for murder without the possibility of parole.” 58% want the legislature to pass a law “replacing the death penalty with a life sentence without the possibility of parole” and the governor to sign it.

While some in the state would revive executions by switching from lethal injection to nitrogen hypoxia, last month, NBC4 reported that “There is once again a renewed push to abolish the death penalty in Ohio but this time, with a bit of a twist.”

The twist is that the new bill would not only end capital punishment, but it would also prohibit the use of state funds to carry out an execution and also prohibit the use of state funds “for physician-assisted suicide and abortion, something already in Ohio law.”

A Republican supporter of the legislation says it seeks to make a simple statement. “Ohio will not fund death.” As Rep. Adam Mathews explains, “The state should not be subsidizing death. It should not be subsidizing ending human life, no matter the form, no matter the circumstance.”

Whether or not that proposal carries the day, Ohio may never carry out another execution. And, if it does not, it may help seal the fate of capital punishment across the United States.

What was once said about national elections may one day be said about the death penalty: As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

Source: verdict.justia.com, Austin Sarat, February 17, 2025

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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