Death penalty opponents are once again calling on the Ohio Legislature to eliminate the practice in the state.
During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, support groups and family members of murder victims gathered to ask for a bill to abolish the death penalty.
“This is a matter of general public policy; it’s a question of whether the system will apply the death penalty consistently across a wide range of cases,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project.
Senate Bill 101 would ban the death penalty, a practice used in Ohio these have been few and far between in recent years and essentially stopped under DeWine because the state was unable to obtain lethal injection drugs from drug companies. With Republicans controlling majorities in both houses of the Ohio General Assembly, the effort faces an uphill battle even with some bipartisan support.
The Death Penalty Policy Project analyzed more than three decades of FBI homicide data and data on law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty and concluded that after 50 years and 1,600 executions nationwide, “the public and police are actually safer in states where that do not have the death penalty or have recently abolished it than in states that do.”
“Furthermore, the states that are most active in executions today are among the least safe for the public and the most dangerous for the police,” Dunham told the committee. “They failed to effectively prevent violence.”
Jonathan Mann has a unique perspective: he must survive the murder of his father in 2017 and ask the state not to employ the death penalty to punish his father’s killer. He said he believed in the death penalty before his father’s death, but as he gained experience, he found the process “does not represent family members of murder victims.”
“You are not adequately representing the victims’ family members, whether they believe in the death penalty or not,” Mann said. “The death penalty doesn’t work. It doesn’t work; “You can’t say it works.”
Bryan Corbett saw one of his family members wrongly accused of murder, and that family member’s reputation and potential were tarnished after he spent over six years on death row before being acquitted. Corbett said the conviction was overturned after it was found that the case used “junk science,” “hypnotized witnesses” and other evidence deemed inadmissible. This means that after more than ten years, two men confessed to the crime.
As a Christian pastor and someone who has witnessed the flaws in the criminal justice system, Corbett said the state cannot continue to treat the death penalty as an option.
“I just want to ask: Who among us is qualified to cast this stone,” Corbett told the committee. “Who among us is qualified to flip that switch and end a life?”
State Rep. Matt Dolan, R-Chagrin Falls, questioned whether it’s up to the Legislature to decide whether the death penalty should be an option, while the state leaves those decisions to a jury of peers.
“Should the Legislature take this away from the people, or should we consider whether it should be a statewide issue and let the people of Ohio… make that decision,” Dolan asked Dunham.
Dunham persisted, arguing that the jury makes decisions based solely on available information and cannot take into account factors resulting from, for example, suppression of evidence or evidence that “the defense failed to conduct an investigation due to poor representation.”
“(Legislators) make public policy, so if we look at the death penalty as a policy, I think you should be the one making those decisions,” Dunham said.
The measure is one of many similar bills that have been enacted in this state over the years, but while the measure has been the subject of much testimony in support of abolition, the legislature has not shown much support for the issue.
One group opposed the current bill during a committee hearing last week. The Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association submitted written testimony saying the association “continues to believe that this topic is important enough that the public should have the opportunity to decide whether Ohio continues to have the death penalty.”
Louis Tobin, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, cited a study conducted by Claremont McKenna College in response to Gallup and Pew Research Center polls expressing support for the abolition of the death penalty and degenerating support for the practice in the United States.
In Claremont McKenna Pollrespondents were asked whether they supported the death penalty when considering specific crimes, rather than general opposition or support for the death penalty.
“They found that support for the death penalty is much more widespread than Gallup or Pew report,” Tobin wrote.
Statistics from the poll cited by Tobin show that 10 of the 15 types of murder selected in the survey – including the rape and murder of a child and involvement in a terrorist attack – “received at least 60% support.”
The only true measure of support is “the vote of the people,” Tobin concluded.
“If supporters of Senate Bill 101 believe their own polls and their own argument that there is no majority support for the death penalty, then they should have no problem agreeing to allow the public to vote and decide the future of the death penalty in Ohio,” Tobin wrote.
OPAA’s executive director has expressed support for a bill that would change the way Ohio carries out the death penalty, which would make a difference add nitrogen hypoxia to the list of protocols that can be used. This method involves asphyxiating the convict by replacing the air he breathes, consisting mainly of nitrogen and oxygen, with pure nitrogen.
Since the current term of the General Assembly expires at the end of the month, the bill may not have much chance of being implemented in that time without a last-minute flurry of legislative support. Besides its bipartisan sponsors, Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, and state Sen. Steve Huffman, R-Tipp City, the bill has only 10 co-sponsors who support it.
Laws that are not approved by the end of the month will have to be reintroduced and the legislative process begin in the up-to-date year.
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