By Marty Schladen
The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
The evils inflicted by and upon Alva Campbell are almost unimaginable, but the Ohio Parole Board must weigh them over the next week.
Campbell’s life hangs in the balance.
The board, which seemed skeptical of Campbell’s plea for clemency during a daylong hearing Thursday, must make a recommendation to Gov. John Kasich by the end of next week. Kasich must decide whether to commute Campbell’s sentence to life imprisonment, delay his execution or allow it to take place as scheduled Nov. 15.
Campbell, 69, is sentenced to die for the April 2, 1997, aggravated murder of 18-year-old Charles Dials.
Attorneys and advocates who are trying to stop the execution have argued that he’s too ill to lie flat on the execution table. But on Thursday they focused on the horrors of his childhood at the hands of a drunken, abusive father and a state system they say failed him from the time he entered it at age 10.
Campbell’s abuse and neglect by his parents was “the worst I have seen in 35 years of doing capital cases,” said David Stebbins, one of his attorneys.
Campbell was the mixed-race son of a racist, alcoholic father who would make his children watch as he beat their mother bloody and often unconscious, Stebbins said. His father also beat the children and molested Campbell’s sisters and mostly likely molested Campbell as well, Stebbins said.
Then, after his father was imprisoned for incest, a 10-year-old Campbell began a journey through state facilities that didn’t protect him. Lighter than 90 percent of boys his age and shorter than 80 percent, Campbell was an easy target for older, bigger boys who beat and raped him, said Bob Stinson, a psychologist who has examined Campbell.
“His only protection was acting out sexually,” Stinson said.
Campbell bounced from facility to facility in a system that warehoused him instead of trying to help him, Stinson said.
“His needs were not met in any way by the state,” Clemens Bartollas, a sociologist and criminologist, said in videotaped testimony. “It’s totally inexcusable how negligent they were in dealing with the needs of this child.”
But the violence of Campbell’s adulthood might be even greater than the horror of his childhood.
“Mr. Campbell is the most violent criminal (case) without question that I have ever worked on,” said Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien, who handled Campbell’s death penalty case personally.
Campbell was on parole from another murder conviction on April 2, 1997, when after faking paralysis, took a deputy’s gun and carjacked and murdered Dials. He had already copped to a string of armed robberies since being released from prison in 1992, meaning that once his parole was revoked, he’d never get out.
And in 1972 when Campbell robbed and murdered William Dovalosky in a Cleveland tavern he was also on parole -- from a 1967 conviction for shooting a State Highway Patrol trooper. At 16, Campbell was tried as an adult and convicted for the shooting and yet another string of armed robberies.
“If we have a death penalty in Ohio, he’s a poster child for it,” O’Brien said, repeating a line he used at Campbell’s trial.
As they listened to arguments Thursday, some members of the parole board indicated they believed that however awful, Campbell’s childhood didn’t excuse his life of violence.
“Sadly, this isn’t the most violent upbringing we’ve ever seen,” Trayce Thalheimer, the board’s vice chair, said, pointing out that many of those inmates never ended up on death row. “It’s not inevitable that because of your background that you end up doing something like this.”
The board also seemed to struggle with the question of how long an adult can continue to blame his or her behavior on past problems, no matter how horrific. R.F. Rauschenberg noted that Campbell was 48 when he killed the 18-year-old Dials in cold blood.
And the board, which regularly deals with Ohio’s worst criminals, seemed struck by Campbell’s violence.
“The level of violence we see in history is remarkable and we see a lot of violence,” Rauschenberg said.
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(c)2017 The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio)