Reviewing the uncertain state of the death penalty in the Buckeye State

Writing in the Columbus Monthly, Andrew Welsh-Huggins has this terrific overview of the curious state of capital punisnment in Ohio. The full headline highlights the lengthy piece’s themes: “Justice For None: What the Future Holds for Ohio’s Death Penalty: After a 5-year unofficial moratorium, the future of capital punishment in the state is unclear, frustrating both supporters and opponents.” Here are excerpts from a piece worth reading in full:

The reasons behind the current de facto moratorium are multifaceted but begin with this: Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has said repeatedly that Ohio can’t obtain the three drugs used in its current execution protocol — midazolam, a sedative; pancuronium bromide or a related drug, a paralyzing agent; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. Even if the state could locate those drugs, DeWine argues, his administration doesn’t want to risk pharmaceutical companies shutting off access to other drugs needed in state institutions, from state-funded medical facilities to psychiatric hospitals to prisons dispensing regular medication to inmates.

Since taking office in January 2019, DeWine has issued more than 40 reprieves affecting 27 death row inmates, including three reprieves as recently as mid-October…. DeWine’s position is of small comfort to death row inmates and their attorneys, since several states — including Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas — continue to carry out executions with lethal drugs with no apparent backlash from pharmaceutical companies. Asked about this discrepancy, DeWine press secretary Dan Tierney stuck to the party line: The concern remains that any drug, obtained directly or through third-party means, could jeopardize the state of Ohio’s access to pharmaceuticals.

As far as capital punishment itself, Tierney says the governor’s position hasn’t changed since December 2020, when at the end of his second year in office he told the Associated Press that while he still supports the death penalty as Ohio law, he has come to question its value since his days as a state senator when he helped write the state’s current law—enacted in 1981—because of the long delays between crime and punishment….

Bipartisan bills to abolish the death penalty have come and gone repeatedly in recent Ohio legislative sessions, with most never advancing beyond a single hearing.  But this fall, two bills have been introduced both in the House and the Senate, and the bills’ supporters think they have more momentum than in the past.  They note a significant selling point: These versions aren’t retroactive — should the legislation be approved and become law, the death penalty would still be in place for inmates currently sentenced to death….

Ohio’s unofficial moratorium also reflects a broader trend: On the books or not, death sentences are rarer and rarer.  Nationally, the number of executions carried out dropped by 82 percent between 1999 and 2022, according to the Washington, D.C.- based Death Penalty Information Center, while death sentences declined 92 percent during the same time period. Ohio had no death sentences last year or in 2021, and just one in 2020.  Meanwhile, DeWine signed a bill into law in early 2021 that prohibits the execution of individuals suffering from such serious mental illnesses as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder or delusional disorders at the time of their crimes. That law alone has removed four inmates from death row….

But adhering to the status quo isn’t good enough for Ohio’s top cop, Attorney General Dave Yost, who in his office’s most recent annual report on capital punishment, said the state was laboring under a “broken capital-punishment system.”  Yost, a Republican and a possible candidate for governor in 2026, used financial estimates of the death penalty from other states to conclude that the extra cost of imposing the death penalty on the 128 inmates on Death Row as of the end of 2022 might range between $128 million to $384 million.  “That’s a stunning amount of money to spend on a program that doesn’t achieve its purpose,” Yost wrote.

He added, “This system satisfies nobody.  Those who oppose the death penalty want it abolished altogether, not ticking away like a time bomb that might or might not explode. Those who support the death penalty want it to be fair, timely and effective.  Neither side is getting what it wants while the state goes on pointlessly burning through enormous taxpayer resources.”