Death Row inmate Richard Cooey denied clemency
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Posted by Reginald Fields
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Richard Wade Cooey II should die for killing two University of Akron students 22 years ago, the Ohio Parole Board said Tuesday.
The seven-member board unanimously rejected Cooey’s arguments for clemency, saying it found no merits in the death row inmate’s claim of ineffective legal assistance.
“Had Mr. Cooey’s trial counsel pursued alternative trial tactics or developed and presented more extensive mitigating factors at trial,” the board’s report states, “it seems unlikely another penalty outcome would have resulted.”
Cooey, 41, is scheduled to die by injection Oct. 14.
The board recommended that Gov. Ted Strickland reject the clemency request and not reduce Cooey’s sentence to life in prison. Strickland could take until the day of the execution to decide.
Cooey has never denied participating in the rape, beating and strangulation of Dawn McCreery and Wendy Jo Offredo in 1986 near Akron but blames his accomplice for delivering the fatal blows.
Clinton Dickens, who was 17 at the time and cooperative with police, according to authorities, was also convicted for the murders and is serving life in prison.
The board’s ruling means Cooey’s successful run at staving off execution may finally be coming to an end.
In 2003, after his first clemency request was denied, Cooey came 12 hours from being executed when a judge granted a request for his case to be reviewed on a claim he had ineffective attorneys.
Cooey then filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of Ohio’s lethal injection process, which won him a stay of execution until the case was dismissed this year.
Now, Cooey -- at 5 feet 7 and more than 275 pounds -- claims in another last-ditch lawsuit to be too fat to be executed, saying the executioners will be unable to find suitable veins to carry the three-drug concoction into his body.
McCreery and Offredo were abducted on Sept. 1, 1986, shortly after midnight, soon after they left work in Akron. Cooey and Dickens had dropped a piece of cement from an overpass onto the women’s car as they drove along a highway. The men then pretended to help the women before eventually killing them.
Robert McCreery Jr., Dawn’s brother, on Tuesday said he expected the board’s decision but knows Cooey has escaped death before and won’t be relieved until he sees him die.
“It’s still not a guarantee,” he said. “It’s still up to the governor to decide. It’s just another thing we have to sweat through.”
Plain Dealer reporter Michael K. McIntyre contributed to this story.