Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has set out the reasoning behind his conclusion that the death penalty is no longer a deterrent and should be abolished in the state. Speaking about capital punishment, he laid out why, after decades of experience, he believes the system no longer works as intended.
He noted that Ohio now has four decades of experience with the death penalty, and that attorneys general have long had specialized lawyers working diligently and exclusively on these cases to try to speed up the process. Despite those efforts, he said, an extremely long waiting period remains between sentencing and execution.
According to the governor, Ohio ranks in the middle of the states in the average number of years between sentencing and execution, so the problem is not unique to Ohio. With a wait time of more than two decades, he argued, the threat of the death penalty today is simply not a deterrent, because there is no certainty over whether those sentenced are ever actually executed.
DeWine pointed to charts showing a dramatic drop over the past four decades in the number of people indicted for capital crimes each year, as well as declines in convictions and in actual executions. The figures, he said, illustrate how the use of the death penalty has steadily fallen decade after decade.
He gave specific numbers on death sentences handed down per year since the penalty was reinstated in 1981. In the 1980s, Ohio averaged 14.25 death sentences each year, falling to 13.6 in the 1990s, to a little over five in the 2000s, and to fewer than four in the 2010s.
The decline has become sharper still in recent years. In the six years of the 2020s so far, the governor said, only two people in total have been sentenced to death in Ohio, a steep drop from the levels seen in earlier decades.
He noted that in 1995 juries were given the option of life without parole, with the first full year that this was in effect being 1996, a change that coincided with the longer-term decline in death sentences.
The governor also described the process leading up to an execution, recalling that a federal judge had at one point required the execution team to carry out four separate practice runs. In those rehearsals, a team member played the role of the condemned, experiencing everything the person would go through except the insertion of the needles, from being secured in the cell to being strapped to the gurney for the full length of the protocol.