Talk of death penalty repeal builds

Ohio’s execution backlog is growing, with 25 scheduled to be put to death and 115 others sitting on death row. Meanwhile, Gov. Mike Dewine has granted 11 stays of execution since he took office just over a year ago as the state has struggled to find a humane, practical way to kill its condemned.

As policymakers and the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction look to obtain intravenous execution drugs or to pass a law allowing an alternative method, there seems to be growing momentum among some conservatives for scrapping the death penalty altogether.

Dewine has been tightlipped about whether he thinks the death penalty should be part of Ohio’s past.

Asked about it last week, he only replied that currently, the death penalty is the law.

But during a news conference in December, Dewine said, “What keeps us safer is locking up repeat violent offenders and throwing away the key,” Gongwer News Service reported.

Then House Speaker Larry Householder, R-glenford, this month questioned the expense and practicability of Ohio’s death penalty. And he questioned whether it isn’t a greater punishment to simply imprison an offender for life so that person can contemplate his or her misdeeds.

Despite the speaker’s apparent openness to repeal and the governor’s ambiguity, tangible movement on the issue in the near future is unlikely. The third member of Ohio’s “Big Three” — Senate President Larry Obhof — is firmly against a repeal. Without his support, the matter is unlikely to gain traction in that chamber.

“I think for people who committed aggravated murder — if we had somebody like the Green River

killer in Ohio — certainly the overwhelming majority of Ohio voters would support the option of the jury being able to have the option of the death penalty for someone like that,” the Medina Republican said in an interview Thursday.

But that doesn’t mean repeal isn’t worth pursuing, said a conservative member of the House. Rep. Laura Lanese, R-grove City, said that any measure as big as ending the death penalty won’t happen overnight.

“I think all rational change begins with a discussion,” she said.

Toward that end, a group calling itself Ohio Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty is holding a news conference Tuesday to announce its formation. The organization, a project of Ohioans to Stop Executions, has signed up Republicans such as former Gov. Bob Taft, who presided over Ohio’s first execution in 1999 after the state reinstated the death penalty in 1981.

Taft declined to comment for this story, but Jim Petro, who served as Ohio attorney general during part of Taft’s

tenure, said executions never sat very easily with him. In the House in 1981, Petro helped draft Ohio’s current execution law. Then, as attorney general, he monitored executions through a video feed and over an open phone line to ensure legal procedures were followed.

“When it was over, I had to go back to my office and just sit,” he said. “These were never very pleasant days, but it was the law.”

Petro’s uneasiness crystallized into opposition as he and his wife, Nancy, researched their book, “False Justice: Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent.”

“There’s absolutely no true certainty,” Petro said of the ultimate punishment. “There could always be a mistake.”

Indeed, there have been mistakes. Joe D’ambrosio walked off of Ohio’s death row in 2010 after being exonerated. He’d spent 20 years there.

Lanese said that the possibility that the government might get it wrong is part of why she opposes the death penalty.

“I think some of us who are more Libertarian, more conservative, are naturally

suspicious of the government,” she said. She added that, as a pro-life Catholic, she saw it as consistent to oppose the death penalty.

There’s been speculation that Dewine, also a pro-life Catholic, is in that camp as well. “I know he’s a man of faith; he’s a very, very good man,” Lanese said. “I can’t be in his head, but it’s a very weighty issue.”

Ohio’s county prosecutors are a group whose input on any death-penalty repeal can’t be ignored. Louis Tobin, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said, “We’re disturbed by discussions of repeal. We think there’s a way forward and we owe it to the people of Ohio to look for it.”

One way forward, he said, would be to renew a confidentiality law that would allow the state to keep secret how the state is obtaining its execution drugs. Oklahoma, which just announced a new supply of execution drugs, has such a statute, said Matt Elliott, spokesman for the state’s Department of Corrections.

But Obhof, who earlier this month brought up Ohio’s expired secrecy statute, poured cold water on that idea.

“I was not suggesting that we re-enact that,” he said Thursday. “I was merely walking through some of the various challenges that we’ve faced over the years in the application of the death penalty in Ohio.”

Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center said such secrecy laws are a recipe for abuse — such as in Ohio, where the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services bought the drugs and sent them to the death chamber without telling suppliers, which adamantly objected to such a use.

“States have been using secrecy as a way of concealing illegal or unethical conduct,” Dunham said.

Tobin and Obhof also said that Ohio should look for an alternative to intravenous injections. Tennessee has revived the use of the electric chair, but both men said that’s not an option for Ohio.

“Absolutely not,” Obhof said. “I think it’s cruel.”