By Jeremy Pelzer
cleveland.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Attorney General Dave Yost on Tuesday issued his strongest rebuke to date of Ohio’s years-long moratorium on executions, calling it “a mockery of the justice system and of the dead and their families.”
Yost, in his office’s final annual report on Ohio’s capital punishment system before the Columbus Republican leaves office next year, called on state lawmakers to pass legislation allowing new execution methods, such as nitrogen gas, while waiting on the Trump administration to help states overcome long-standing problems with obtaining lethal-injection drugs.
The report comes a day after the group Ohioans to Stop Executions released a report of its own concluding that Ohio has a “wrongful conviction crisis,” given that, roughly, for every five people the state has executed, one has been exonerated from Death Row.
Ohio hasn’t put anyone to death since Robert Van Hook in July 2018. Gov. Mike DeWine, sworn in six months later, has said he will not allow executions during his tenure, arguing they could jeopardize access to drugs for thousands of Ohioans — including Medicaid recipients, state troopers and prison inmate.
DeWine, a Greene County Republican, has also suggested he’s thinking about announcing his personal opposition to the death penalty, though so far that hasn’t happened.
Ohio currently has 108 people on Death Row, according to state prison statistics. Each of them has been convicted of aggravated murder – that is, murder committed under additional, more heinous circumstances, such as killing someone while raping or kidnapping them, killing a young child or a police officer and/or committing multiple murders.
On average, each of those inmates has spent 22.78 years on Death Row, according to Yost’s report. That puts Ohio 12th among the 28 states that allow executions.
Protecting ‘monsters’
Yost’s report didn’t call out DeWine or any state lawmakers by name, but it assailed “present leadership” for not doing more to lift the state’s death-penalty moratorium.
“For the worst-of-the-worst killers, Ohio is wandering in a wilderness of lawlessness and desert of justice,” the report stated. “At this point, we as a state bear responsibility for the horrors these families endured.”
Some Republican lawmakers have proposed bills to permit executions using nitrogen gas, as well as enlist the Trump administration’s help to obtain lethal-injection drugs, but none of those proposals have gone anywhere.
At the same time, bipartisan proposals to abolish Ohio’s death penalty have also failed to gain traction at the Statehouse. House Speaker Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, said in February that he would “vigorously oppose” any such legislation if DeWine calls for it.
Yost annual reports on Ohio’s death-penalty process, which are required under state law, have turned increasingly forceful in calling for a resumption of executions.
The last two reports his office issued focused more on the economic argument for changing the status quo, arguing the state is spending hundreds of millions of dollars unnecessarily to keep inmates on Death Row .
Yost’s latest report cites estimates from the nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission that the current cost of capital cases ranges from $116 million to $348 million.
Tuesday’s report, though, frames the resumption of executions primarily as a moral issue, not a fiscal one.
“This [report] exists because monsters exist,” Yost’s report stated. “Unfortunately, Ohio is protecting them.”
‘A massive wrongful conviction problem’
The Ohioans to Stop Executions report, released Monday, reaches a very different conclusion: that if the state resumes executions, innocent people will die.
The report details the cases of 12 Ohio Death Row inmates who were released after being proven innocent. Given Ohio has staged 56 executions since the state’s death penalty was revived in the early 1980s, that’s roughly one exoneration for every five executions.
The group’s report also lists:
- Nine current Death Row inmates with “compelling innocence claims”
- Five inmates whose death sentences were commuted close to their execution dates because of concerns about their guilt, and
- 12 “shadow exonerations” — cases in which prosecutors sought the death penalty, but the defendants were sentenced to life in prison before their innocence was established.
“It turns out Ohio has a massive wrongful conviction problem, far worse than anyone imagined,” Kevin Werner, executive director of Ohioans to Stop Executions, said in a statement. “Attempts to restart executions will result in the execution of innocent people, and no one wants that.”
Yost’s report pushed back hard on that argument, stating the “prevailing myth that the innocent populate Death Row ...is not supported by any facts, at least in this state.”
There are no known cases in which Ohio executed someone later found to be innocent, Yost’s report stated.
When exonerations do happen, “it is evidence that the system works as designed,” Yost’s report stated, adding that they are usually the result of legal errors instead of a finding of innocence.
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