Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wants Ohio to abolish the death penalty, but stopped short of taking any executive action Tuesday when he held a news conference on the subject.
“It is impossible today to make the case that the death penalty is a deterrent,” DeWine said. “I no longer believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. … The most effective thing to deal with violent crime is to go after the repeat violent offenders and lock them the hell up, that’s what’s effective.”
DeWine is calling on Ohio lawmakers to either take action legislatively or have the death penalty on the Ohio ballot for voters to decide, but DeWine said he does not want to lead a citizen-initiated statue.
“I don’t think (a citizen-initiated statue) is an effective pathway,” DeWine said. “It seems to me these things, the legislature decides if it gets on the ballot because the legislature pushed it on, unless there’s a whole bunch of money behind it.”
Ohio lawmakers have introduced bills — Ohio Senate Bill 133, Ohio Senate Bill 134, and Ohio House Bill 72 — that would end the death penalty, but none of the bills have received a hearing. Any bill that does not pass before the end of the year must be reintroduced in the new General Assembly to be considered.
Ohio’s death penalty was reinstated in 1981 after a law DeWine helped write passed and was signed into law.
“I believed that in some cases capital punishment could serve as a deterrent to keep some people from killing,” DeWine said. “For me, it was the moral justification for having a death penalty. … I’m responsible for that decision.”
DeWine is in his final months in office as he is term-limited and said he has not talked to Ohio Republican governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy about the death penalty.
“I felt that I had an obligation to explain to people why I now believe that the death penalty is not a deterrent, and why I believe that we should abolish the death penalty,” DeWine said.
Ohio’s last execution was in July 2018, months before DeWine was elected governor. DeWine put a hold on all capital punishment due to not having enough lethal injection drugs to carry out the execution at the end of 2020.
Ohio has 113 inmates on death row, the nation’s fifth-largest death row population, according to former Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s Capital Crimes report that was published in April.
Of the 337 people in Ohio who have received a death sentence since 1981, 56 people have been executed. Forty-one died of either natural causes or of suicide on death row, and 89 death sentences were overturned, DeWine said.
Certainty and swiftness are the two things DeWine said he looked at when determining whether capital punishment is a deterrent — will the death penalty be carried out and how long does it take from sentencing to execution?
“It would seem that if the death penalty were an actual deterrent for some people, it would need to happen quickly,” DeWine said. “Statistically, the odds of the death penalty actually being carried out are very low, and if it is carried out, it is all but guaranteed it will take a long, long time for that execution to happen.”
The elapsed time between sentencing and execution ranged from 14 to 32 years for the last 10 people who were executed in Ohio — averaging 21 years, DeWine said. Those statistics omit the people who have died waiting to be executed or whose case was overturned.
“The truth is that there is no prospect that these long delays will be substantially changed in the future,” DeWine said.
Ohio averaged 14.25 death penalty sentences each year in the 1980s, and 13.6 death penalty sentences per year in the 1990s, a little more than five death penalty sentences per year in the 2000s, less than four death penalty sentences per year in the 2010, and only two people have been sentenced to death since 2020, DeWine said.
“The odds of a murderer being indicted for capital offense are dramatically less today, and the odds of them being sentenced to death are even more remote,” DeWine said.
“Throughout my career, I’ve always stated that the most important way to protect the public is to lock up violent criminals and to keep them out of society. That is a proven way of saving lives and protecting our citizens.”
DeWine also talked about the victim’s families.
“One feeling, however, seemingly universally held by victims’ families is that the long, long wait to see if the death penalty is carried out is frustrating and very hurtful to these victims,” he said.
“Any decision to officially end the death penalty in Ohio can not change the hurt and anger that we all feel in regard to these murderers, nor the deep sorrow we feel for the victims, and for the pains. These murderers ended the life of a precious human being.”
Death Penalty Action Executive Director Abraham Bonowitz said DeWine’s call to abolish Ohio’s death penalty is well-reasoned.
“The legislature already knows this cannot be fixed, and if we can’t fix it, we must end it,” he said in a statement.
Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, said he supports the death penalty in Ohio for the “most heinous crimes.”
“While I respect Governor DeWine’s perspective, I disagree with his conclusion that the General Assembly should eliminate capital punishment altogether,” he said in a statement.
DeWine said he respects Huffman’s opinion.
“Reasonable people for centuries have come down on both sides of this issue for thousands of years,” DeWine said. “There are good people on both sides who have thought it through and tried to figure out what is the right thing.”
Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, thanked DeWine for his support in trying to end the death penalty.
“I have talked with countless families and advocates and have come to understand an absolute truth: the death penalty is not justice, but rather a component of a broken justice system,” she said in a statement.
“Capital punishment is not the answer for Ohio. We must abolish the death penalty and seek justice for families by instituting life sentences without parole, ending their recurring trauma of the appeal process.”
Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, told reporters in April that the death penalty is a very complicated issue.
“(It) elicits a lot of emotions from a lot of people, but I would imagine that if it were to come up for a vote, we would not have the votes in our Republican caucus to pass it,” he said.
He said he personally is “in the middle” when it comes to his own personal stance on the death penalty and sees some cases where the death penalty seems appropriate.
“I look at other cases where we’ve seen individuals who are on death row who end up being exonerated later on because there was exculpatory evidence that maybe was withheld, and you’d hate to see somebody go through the entire death row process and wind up being executed. … That’s a very small minority of those cases.”
Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. do not have the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
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This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.
