Death Penalty News

Ohio Gov. John Kasich has finished dealing with executions for the remainder of his time in office following a modern-era record of death penalty commutations. The Republican governor spared 7 men from execution during his 2 terms in office, including commutations on March 26 and July 20.  Kasich allowed 15 executions to proceed, including the July 18 execution of Robert Van Hook for strangling, stabbing and dismembering a man he met in a Cincinnati bar more than 30 years ago. Not since Democrat Mike DiSalle spared 6 death row inmates in the early 1960s has an Ohio governor spared so many killers during periods when the state had an active death chamber. DiSalle allowed 6 executions to proceed. Democratic Gov. Richard Celeste commuted 8 death sentences just days before leaving office in 1991, but none of those inmates' executions was imminent. Kasich "appreciates the gravity of this authority and therefore carefully considers these cases to make decision...

The famous appellate judge Richard Posner once wrote, “A civilized society locks up [criminals] until age makes them harmless, but it does not keep them in prison until they die.” The state of Ohio apparently hasn’t heard of Judge Posner, as they went one step further and tried to execute an elderly Alva Campbell and failed. Ohio’s lethal injection team spent more than 30 minutes poking Alva Campbell’s decrepit body in search of any decent vein into which they could inject their lethal cocktail to no avail. They finally relented — but only temporarily. Hours later, Gov. John Kasich announced not a commutation — or a plan to investigate what went wrong — but that Campbell’s execution would be rescheduled for 2019. It’s a travesty of justice that Ohio’s bungled attempt at executing Alva Campbell was both predictable and avoidable. Campbell’s attorneys had in fact informed the governor and courts that their client’s abysmal health made him a uniquely poor candidate for leth...

Ohio's failure to execute a condemned killer with poor veins despite multiple claims by the state that the veins were accessible will lead to new challenges of the state lethal injection process, death penalty experts predict. Each new problem with executions adds to the question of whether Ohio is violating the constitutional rights of death-row prisoners, Mike Benza, a Case Western Reserve University law professor who has represented death-row inmates, said Thursday.

A day after another failed execution in Ohio, Gov. John Kasich's office says the state's capital-punishment protocol doesn't need to change. Meanwhile, civil-rights advocates say the latest failure could be used as evidence in future challenges to the constitutionality of Ohio's death-penalty law.

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 ...

Ohio's death penalty is on hold, but the delay won't prevent more than 100 local anti-capital punishment activists from boarding buses Tuesday morning for a lobby day in Columbus. Converging on the Statehouse from across Ohio, protesters will meet with lawmakers and present a letter signed by 200 faith leaders calling for an end to the death penalty. "We are concerned with the injustices built into the system," said Sister Andrea Koverman, a Catholic nun and program manager at Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center, Over-the-Rhine. "It is applied unfairly based on race, economics and geography." Hamilton County has historically populated Ohio's death row in disproportionate numbers. Of the 139 convicted murders on death row today -- 138 men -- 24 are from Hamilton County and 21 from Cuyahoga County. Hamilton County's 0.6 executions per 100 homicide victims is double the rate of Cuyahoga and nine times that of Franklin County, home of ...

Ohio has 22 convicted murderers scheduled for execution during the next 3 years - but no lethal-injection drugs with which to kill them. The 2015 Capital Crimes Report, required annually by state law, was issued Friday by Attorney General Mike DeWine. The report lists the status of all capital punishment cases currently pending in state and federal courts. What DeWine's report did not address is the lack of drugs to conduct executions. The state has been at a standstill since the last execution, of Dennis McGuire on Jan. 16, 2014, largely due to the unavailability of suitable lethal-injection drugs and court challenges. That has not changed, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction confirmed Friday. "DRC continues to seek all legal means to obtain the drugs necessary to carry out court-ordered executions," spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said. "This process has included multiple options." The options include seeking...

Governor John Kasich But most shooters kill themselves. Ohio Governor John Kasich told reporters in New Hampshire on Friday that he considers the death penalty and long prison sentences a better approach than gun control when it comes to reducing the number of mass shootings. Kasich, who voted for a federal assault weapons ban as a Republican congressman two decades ago, demurred when asked what steps Washington should take in the wake of the Thursday massacre at Umpquah Community College in Oregon that left 10 people dead. "I don’t believe that gun control would stop this," he told a scrum of journalists after a town hall in Goffstown, during which the subject did not come up. Kasich continued: I think they have very tough gun laws in that state. The fact is that more and more people believe that they should be able to defend themselves. And if take guns away from people who are law-abiding the people who are going to cause these horrible things are still ...

The state now has 2 dozen condemned killers with firm execution dates, but with 4 months before the 1st one, it still doesn't have the lethal drugs it needs to carry them out. The state's inability to find drugs has death penalty opponents calling for the end of capital punishment in Ohio. Supporters say the state needs to keep looking or find alternatives to provide justice for killings that are in some cases decades old. "Rather than frustrate that process it would seem to me their goal ought to be to carry out that process," said Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien, who's contacted the prisons department, the attorney general and the governor's office for updates on their progress finding drugs. One option he'd like Ohio to consider: nitrogen gas, approved by Oklahoma in April as an execution alternative. On Jan. 21, the state is scheduled to execute Ronald Phillips for raping and killing his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughte...

Missouri Death Chamber Defense lawyers call it a crisis; the state says it's just doing its job. Since Texas carried out the country's 1st lethal injection in 1982, the state has performed far more executions than any other state. To date, 528 men and women have been put to death in Texas, more than the total in the next 8 states combined. But viewed from a slightly different angle, Texas has lost its place as the epicenter of the American death penalty, at least for the moment. Since November 2013, when Missouri began performing executions at a rate of almost 1 per month, the state has outstripped Texas in terms of the execution rate per capita . In 2014, both states executed 10 people, but Texas has more than 4 times the population of Missouri. This year, the difference is not quite as stark (Texas: 10, Missouri: 5) but Missouri still ranks number 1. The state that has become the center of so many conversations about criminal justice through the courts and co...

A letter from the FDA warned the state that importing the drug would break the law. The state of Ohio planned to illegally import sodium thiopental, a drug used for executions, according to a Food and Drug Administration letter obtained by BuzzFeed through a Freedom of Information Act request. The June letter says that Ohio planned to "obtain bulk and finished dosage forms of sodium thiopental." Since the drug is not available in the US, wrote Domenic Veneziano, director of the FDA's import operation, "we assume this product would be purchased from an oversees source." Veneziano reminded Ohio Director of Rehabilitation and Correction Gary C. Mohr that "there is no FDA approved application for sodium thiopental, and it is illegal to import an unapproved new drug into the United States." According to BuzzFeed: The prison Ohio carries out executions in registered for a DEA license to import the drug last year for a "law enforce...

Criminal justice reform is the 1 issue that just about everyone seems to agree on right now. There are certainly disagreements over the details, but from the Koch Brothers to ThinkProgress, from Rand Paul to Bernie Sanders, from Newt Gingrich to Al Sharpton, from the Heritage Foundation to Black Lives Matter, nearly everyone agrees at least in principle that the system needs to be reformed. Oddly though, criminal justice is all but absent on the websites most of the major contenders for the 2016 election. I just reviewed the sites for all of the announced candidates. (I know, I'm a glutton for punishment.) The 1st thing that struck me odd is just how little discussion there is of any issue on the candidates' sites. Everyone has a bio, links to donate, links to volunteer, and a schedule. Some sites list the candidate's major pieces of legislation and accomplishments in office, which does at least give some indication of what issues are important and where they stand o...