Early tests for a new capital era in Ohio?

Posts here and here after the elections explored whether a new governor and attorney general might impact the death penalty in Ohio.  Today’s Columbus Dispatch has this front-page article spotlighting that Governor-elect Ted Strickland now faces two scheduled executions right away:

In early 2005, when Ted Strickland was thinking about running for governor, he especially agonized over one subject.  Capital punishment. “This was the thing I spent the most personal time thinking about and coming to terms with,” the governor-elect told The Dispatch.

Strickland, a six-term Democratic congressman, Methodist minister and former prison psychologist, won’t have much time to dwell on it next month.  The Ohio Supreme Court set execution dates yesterday for two killers during his initial five weeks as governor, the first just 15 days after he takes the oath of office….

Ohio governors have virtually unlimited power to grant commutations and reprieves or allow executions to proceed as scheduled…. During the seven years he worked at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville, Strickland said he sometimes counseled Death Row prisoners and learned they were not all the same, having come from variety of educational, economic and family backgrounds…. 

State Sen. Marc Dann, a Youngstown-area Democrat who will take over as attorney general next month, has even stronger reservations about the death penalty.  But, like Strickland, he said yesterday that he plans to follow the law.

Dann is working on a transition with Attorney General Jim Petro, whom he will succeed, and is getting up to speed on the death-penalty process. “The only time my hands started sweating was when he described the attorney general’s role in the execution process. “But I signed up for the job. We’re going to make sure the law is followed.”  He will “shadow” Petro during Tuesday’s execution of Jerome Henderson, of Hamilton County.  Henderson would be the 25th and last man to be executed during Gov. Bob Taft’s eight years in office.

Of course, the Ohio Death Penalty Information blog is the place to go for … information about the death penalty in Ohio.