Abolishing Ohio’s Death Penalty Gains Steam

By Gregory T. Moore

A new effort to abolish the death penalty in Ohio is gaining strength in the Ohio General Assembly with a reasonable chance of passing in the upcoming 2024 legislative session. Legislation has been introduced on a bi-partisan basis in the Ohio House and Senate, with support coming from both Democrat and Republican legislators representing urban and rural districts across the state.

The bipartisan effort is being led by Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nikki Antonio (D-23rd Lakewood) and Stephen Huffman (R-5th Troy) who have jointly introduced SB 101 legislation to end the death penalty in the state of Ohio and replace it with a sentence of life in prison without parole for capital cases. A companion bill, HB 259 has also been introduced in the Ohio House by Rep. Alan Miller, (D-6th Columbus), and Jean Schmidt (R-62nd Scioto).

A statewide coalition under the banner No Death Penalty Ohio is leading the advocacy efforts statewide to build grassroots support for the legislation. The coalition is made up of civic, religious, and civil liberty organizations that have worked to end capital punishment in Ohio for many years. According to Ohioans to Stop Executions, (OTSE), one of the leading groups within the coalition, eleven people in Ohio have been sentenced to death only to be later exonerated. A statement from the coalition leaders stressed that for every five executions in our state, one person has been exonerated. “These wrongful convictions rob innocent people of decades of their lives, waste tax dollars, and retraumatize the victims’ families, while the people responsible remain unaccountable.”

The main debate regarding the impact of abolition centers around the excessive cost and effectiveness of maintaining and carrying out the death penalty. On March 31, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost released Ohio’s annual Capital Crimes report for 2022 which estimated that it will cost Ohio between $128 million and $384 million to impose the death penalty on the 128 prisoners currently on death row.

According to the Ohio Legislative Service Council (OLSC), capital cases exceeded the cost of life-imprisonment sentences by $1-3 Million per case. Fifty inmates convicted of murder have been executed in Ohio since 1999, with 128 inmates currently on death row according to the Death Penalty Information Center.  The sole method of executions in the state has been through lethal injections. According to the Ohio ACLU, there have been “five botched executions in Ohio from 2006-2017” where the injection procedure failed to carry out the execution. Other former methods of execution such as the electric chair, gas chambers, and hanging have been outlawed in Ohio and most other states for many years.

The lethal injection procedure of executions has been upended by systemic problems with the state procuring the proper pharmaceuticals to carry out the executions. According to the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union, over forty reprieves of scheduled executions have been granted since 2018 due to complications in purchasing lethal drugs from drug manufacturers. As a result, on December 8, 2020, Governor Mike DeWine placed an “unofficial moratorium” on capital punishment in the state.

Pharmaceutical companies in both the US and overseas have cut off sales of lethal drugs to states that utilize them for executions on either legal or moral grounds. With a high demand for pharmaceuticals in state-run prisons, hospitals, clinics, and other public facilities at risk, Governor DeWine has called on Ohio lawmakers to “find alternative forms of execution beyond lethal injections.”

The Office of the Ohio Attorney General issues a Capital Crimes Annual Report that summarizes the status of the state’s administration of the death penalty. Among the most important startling findings from the 2022 report were that “Ohio imposes death sentences on perpetrators of brutal and revolting murders, then spends years debating, reviewing, appealing and failing to act on those decisions.” The report estimated that an inmate on death row in Ohio spends an average of 21 years on death row before an actual execution is set.

The report noted that the slow pace of legal appeals “illustrate the glacial pace of capital cases.” The years of prolonged delays between sentencing and actual executions have created a demographic of death row inmates who are disproportionately African American and older men.

Despite the racial disparities and its excessive cost, there is still staunch support for Ohio’s death penalty among Ohio’s county prosecutors, sheriffs, and law enforcement leaders. Their main concern centers around the impact of losing the death penalty as a deterrent to the killing of law enforcement officers in the line of duty. Nationwide, there has been a more expansive debate among law enforcement officials on whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent among today’s hardened criminal elements. A 2009 poll commissioned by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) found police chiefs ranked the death penalty last among ways to reduce violent crime. A large segment of police chiefs considered the death penalty the least efficient use of taxpayers’ money. Many cited the excessive cost of instituting the death penalty in their states. With frequent budget cuts and equipment shortages, the death penalty was seen as draining hundreds of millions of scarce state dollars from the other needs of the criminal justice system.

Senate Bill 101 co-sponsor, Republican Senator Stephen Huffman, credits his religious beliefs for his change of heart about the issue, stating “Like so many Ohioans, I once supported capital punishment and over time, with prayer and reflection, have come to believe that it’s the wrong policy for the state of Ohio. Human life is precious. It’s not the role of the government to end the life of citizens.”

Both Senate co-sponsors have expressed optimism about passing the bill in the upcoming legislative session. Senator Nikki Antonio acknowledged that “There is a team right now that is dedicated to ending the death penalty in Ohio. And that team can only get larger.”