Ohio Governor Ted Strickland decided today to commute Richard Nields death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole after mounting evidence pointed to irregularities with the coroner office and investigation of the crime.

Gov. Ted Strickland spared the life of Richard Nields, a Finneytown man who was slated to die next week for murdering his girlfriend.

Strickland opted to give him life without parole. He agreed with the 4-3 vote of the Ohio Parole Board.

Nields, 60, was scheduled to be executed June 10.

The majority of the seven-member board said medical examiner testimony at the 1997 trial was faulty and the appeals court continually had expressed trouble over whether the case had merited death-penalty consideration.

The ABJ once agains raises important questions about the use of the death penalty in Ohio.

The state Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections wants to know how Lawrence Reynolds, a prisoner on death row, obtained drugs sufficient to cause an overdose on the eve of his scheduled execution. The questions hardly stop there. Once Reynolds gained the drugs, when did he ingest them? Authorities insist they were monitoring closely his moods and actions.

The machinery of capital punishment has a dismaying record in Ohio. A federal court of appeals has pointed to ”alarming difficulties” involving a protocol (now changed), the execution team, for instance, in a prolonged search for a vein to carry the lethal injection. A new protocol has been used effectively three times. Reynolds is scheduled to be the fourth prisoner put to the death, his execution now set for next week, pending his recovery in a Youngstown hospital.

Few people missed the absurdity, the state rushing to save the life of an inmate it intends to execute. Now the question arises: What about the extent of his care? Just enough so that he can be put to death?

Lawrence Reynolds has been rescheduled for execution on March 16, 2010.

Officials say an Ohio death row inmate was attempting suicide when he overdosed on pills two days before his scheduled execution.

Spokeswoman Julie Walburn said today that the determination was made by prisons department mental health staff.

She says investigators are exploring whether Lawrence Reynolds Jr. had any visitors before the overdose and if he stockpiled medication prescribed for him, as suggested by Gov. Ted Strickland.

Reynolds was to have been executed yesterday but was found unconscious in his cell Sunday and hospitalized. He’s back in prison on suicide watch, with his execution rescheduled for March 16.

Prison officials have not identified the drug Reynolds took.

The investigation is being handled by the prisons department with the Highway Patrol.

Ohio executed Mark Brown today, making him the third person killed since Ohio introduced new execution procedures late last year.

Ohio on Thursday executed a man who bragged that he would copy a killing scene from a violent movie, then shot a convenience store owner and a clerk to death.

Mark Brown, 37, was put to death at 10:49 a.m. with a single dose of a powerful anesthetic under the state’s new injection procedure, with death coming about nine minutes after the drug began flowing.

Brown did not give a last statement.

After the single dose of thiopental sodium was administered at 10:40 a.m., he blinked several times, closed and opened his eyes and swallowed once before shutting his eyes a last time.

Retiring Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections Director Terry Collins may soon speak out on his personal views of the death penalty.

When the man who oversaw a first-of-a-kind lethal injection wakes up on Monday, he’ll be free to do what people the world over have done: Take a position on the death penalty.

Ohio prisons director Terry Collins retires Sunday after 32 years at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, almost four as director.

The 56-year-old Collins isn’t giving his position yet but notes growing concern over the death penalty, citing cases where condemned prisoners were exonerated by DNA evidence and the cost of trials and lengthy appeals.

Attorneys for Romell Broom discover some disturbing information about the training and qualifications of one of the members of the execution team.

One of the executioners involved in last year’s botched attempt to put a man to death was under-trained and failed to attend all required rehearsals for the Sept. 15 execution, lawyers said in court filings.

The employee’s prison job does not require him to establish intravenous access on a regular basis, and he has not regularly inserted IV lines except in executions since 2004 and not at all in the past year, according to a filing by condemned inmate Romell Broom, whose execution was halted by Gov. Ted Strickland, and a related filing by inmates challenging Ohio’s injection method.

The executioner known as Team Member 21 is a full-time prison employee and licensed emergency medical technician who has not worked as an EMT for several years, according to the documents filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus on Friday.

The filing by inmates challenging the injection method also said the prison system has consistently permitted executioners who didn’t receive required training or missed rehearsals to participate in executions anyway.

Today, Ohio executed another person using an experiemntal one-drug procedure.

Ohio executed a man Thursday for the shooting death of a shopkeeper during a 1993 robbery, successfully using its new one-drug lethal injection method for the second time.

Vernon Smith, 37, was pronounced dead at 10:28 a.m., eight minutes after the single dose of sodium thiopental began flowing at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. That was faster than the 10 minutes it took for Kenneth Biros to die during the state’s first execution with a single drug last month.

The single drug injection replaced the standard three-chemical combination that has come under legal attack by attorneys who say it can cause excruciating pain.

Experts had initially predicted the method would result in more drawn out executions. But the time it took Biros and Smith to die was about as long as it has taken other inmates in Ohio and elsewhere to succumb to the three-drug combination.

Ohio plans to carry out another execution tomorrow, January 7th.

Standing at their father’s grave with snow skirting their ankles, Mona and Dolly Darwish recited the opening verses of the Qur’an.

It was both a birthday wish and a sign of respect for Sohail Darwish, a father they never really knew but who is kept alive through stories, photographs, and this solemn annual tradition done every year on Dec. 22.

On this visit, the girls - Mona, 16, and Dolly, 17 - wished their father what would have been a happy 45th birthday.

It was on May 26, 1993, just days before Dolly’s first birthday and months before Mona was born, that two men entered the central-city store that Sohail and Charlotte Darwish owned. A third man waited in a car outside.

2009 was a chaotic year for the death penalty in the United States.

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “They were absolutely singular on this topic” — capital punishment — “because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”

Statistics show fewer courts are assigning people with death penalty sentences across the country.

U.S. courts in 2009 have issued the fewest death sentences in any year since the resumption of executions in the United States in 1976, according to a report released today, Dec. 18, by the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Ohio has added only one new convict to death row, a new low except for 1979-82, when state legislators were rewriting an old death penalty law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The one new death sentence in Ohio this year compares with 25 in 1977, 21 in 1985 and 17 each in 1983, 1995 and 1996, according to statistics compiled by the center. Nationwide, there were 106 new death sentences in 2009 as of Wednesday, down from 284 in 1999.

The New York Times weighs in on Ohio’s resumed executions and points out that no amount of “tinkering” with the protocols will offset the unavoidable fact that the system is simply broken.

This is what passes for progress in the application of the death penalty: Kenneth Biros, a convicted murderer, was put to death in Ohio last week with one drug, instead of the more common three-drug cocktail. It took executioners 30 minutes to find a vein for the needle, compared with the two hours spent hunting for a vein on the last prisoner Ohio tried to kill, Romell Broom. Technicians tried about 18 times to get the needle into Mr. Broom’s arms and legs before they gave up trying to kill him. Mr. Biros was jabbed only a few times in each arm.

Ohio adopted the single-drug formula after the botched execution. It may well be an improvement over the three-drug cocktail, or may not. (Death penalty advocates who hailed it as less painful have no way, obviously, of knowing that.) But the execution only reinforced that any form of capital punishment is legally suspect and morally wrong.

The ACLU strongly opposed the state’s decision to continue executions and pointed out the enduring problems that plague the flawed system.

I’ve heard the expression, “It’s like rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic” many times to describe someone’s ambivalence towards a monumental problem, but it has never rung as true as it does today.

Less than three months after the unprecedented failed execution of Romell Broom, in which officials had to abandon the procedure because they could not locate a viable vein, the state has reopened its death chamber. At 11 a.m. on December 8, 2009, Kenneth Biros was executed using an untested, experimental one-drug protocol devised by the state in the weeks following Broom’s botched execution. The state publicly unveiled the procedure in late November, giving them only a few weeks to implement it and train the execution team on the new protocols.

Proponents of the death penalty hailed the new protocols as a major advancement towards error-free executions. The proclamations were eerily reminiscent of proponents’ original reaction when lethal injection was first implemented decades ago. However, if we have learned anything from the botched executions that have taken place since then, it is that there is simply no humane way to kill a person.

Ohio has still not addressed the underlying problems with its lethal injection procedures nor the overall death penalty system. After three botched executions in as many years, it is painfully clear the state’s execution team is simply not qualified to handle problems when the procedure goes awry. Those who carry out the execution only have the bare minimum of medical training, as no doctor or nurse will serve on the team. Now that the state has implemented an experimental procedure, the chances are even greater that unexpected complications will arise that the execution team will not be equipped to resolve.

Lost in the debate around lethal injection procedures has been the state’s failure to resolve the core issues of fairness that have been raised in studies by the League of Women Voters and Associated Press (PDF), and American Bar Association. Each of these studies have found that defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty based on their race, the race of their victim, the county where the crime was committed, and their socioeconomic class. In addition, the studies have raised serious concerns about Ohio capital punishment defendants’ access to adequate legal services, overall due process rights, lack of guidelines for the state to maintain biological evidence, and a host of other issues.

The net result has been the creation of a perfect storm in Ohio where any number of terrible tragedies may occur if officials continue to blindly support the death penalty. The stakes are simply too high for us to wait until the next botched execution or even the death of an innocent person to address the fundamental flaws in our death penalty system.

The execution of Kenneth Biros on December 8, 2009 did not occur without incident–officials struggled to find a viable vein and had to try several times.

Ohio’s new single-drug execution protocol worked as planned Tuesday, putting Kenneth Biros to death in about 10 minutes.

Prison staff who volunteered to participate in the execution process were able to find one viable vein to hold an intravenous shunt, which was used to administer the lethal injection.

They worked for about 30 minutes, attempting to establish IV sites in both arms but eventually gave up on the right and focused on a vein in his left arm.

The state did not have to turn to its backup plan, which would have required a direct injection of two drugs directly into Biros’ muscle.

The ABJ once again gets it right in its assessment of the state of Ohio’s death penalty system.

After the failed execution of Romell Broom in September, state officials launched a review of the way Ohio conducts the lethal injection of those prisoners sentenced to death. On Friday, they unveiled the results: The state will divert from the practice of other states, choosing now to inject a single drug rather than a three-drug combination.

That combination included a drug to paralyze the inmate’s muscles and another to stop the heart. The trouble in the Broom case involved the failure to find an accessible vein for the IV line. The new method doesn’t remove the need to use a vein. It does limit the practice to one attempt, a massive amount of an anesthetic. If problems surface, the execution team could deploy a backup procedure, injecting a fatal dose of two chemicals into the inmate’s muscles.

A single injection is the preferred approach in animal euthanasia, and many experts have argued persuasively that it serves as a more humane way to conduct executions. Thus, the change represents a step forward for Ohio. The invitation now is there for other states to follow, even though the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the three-drug procedure.

Judge James Burge and ACLU Cooperating Attorney Jeff Gamso react to Ohio’s announcement that they will alter the state’s execution procedures. Burge previously ruled that Ohio’s procedures violated state law.

Death row inmates will have no legal grounds to argue about Ohio’s new lethal injection procedure, said the judge who ruled the state’s three-drug cocktail was unconstitutional.

Yesterday, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections Director Terry Collins said the state will stop using a three-drug cocktail to execute the state’s worst offenders. Instead, a single intravenous drug will be used to execute inmates, or a two-drug injection into the muscle if workers cannot maintain an IV in the prisoner.

The new state execution protocol is “exactly what I had thought wouldbe constitutional,” Lorain County Common Pleas Court Judge James M. Burge said.

“I suppose that’s some affirmation,” he said yesterday.

The state announcement came as a surprise, Burge said.

“I am surprised because the resistance to my suggestion was so strong,” Burge said.

More information has come to light about the state’s attempts to alter its execution procedures and use medical professionals to advise how to best administer the drug’s properly to kill the person.

Finding medical professionals willing to advise Ohio on the best way to put condemned inmates to death is proving difficult because of ethical and professional rules, the state’s top attorney said.

The rules — which generally prohibit doctors, nurses and others from involvement in capital punishment — are deterring those professionals from speaking publicly or privately about alternatives to the state’s lethal injection process, Attorney General Richard Cordray said.

“A small number of promising leads have emerged, but identifying qualified medical personnel willing and able to provide advice to the State regarding lethal injection options continues to be challenging and time-consuming,” Cordray said in the Friday filing in U.S. District Court.

Executions are on hold in Ohio while the state develops new injection policies following a Sept. 15 execution that was stopped because the inmate had no usable veins.

The state has reached out to judges, police and lawmakers for help trying to find medical professionals willing to talk to the state, according to the filing written on Cordray’s behalf by Charles Wille, head of Cordray’s death penalty unit.

The PD once again points out some of the fundamental flaws in our broken death penalty system.

It has been 27 years since neo-Nazi Frank Spisak Jr. terrorized Cleveland State University by fatally shooting three men over a seven-month period. A year later, Spisak was convicted of the murders and sentenced to die.

Last Tuesday, Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court to argue in the latest appeal arising from Spisak’s case and the second to reach the nation’s highest court. At issue: Whether the late attorney Thomas Shaughnessy put on a sufficient defense during the sentencing phase of Spisak’s trial to permit his execution.

The mere fact that Spisak is alive and litigating is a reminder of how seriously our judicial system treats capital cases. Before anyone is put to death, he or she is given multiple chances to test the finding of guilt and to present mitigating evidence. Even vehement supporters of capital punishment probably would not want an execution tainted by doubt to proceed.

Cleveland Scene files a great report on the secrecy of the death penalty in Ohio and how frighteningly incompetant the state is in performing executions.

Romell Broom achieved a macabre notoriety this past month when he became the first man to survive his date with the needle. Not just in Ohio, but anywhere.

The convicted rapist and murderer endured more than two hours of poking and stabbing before his date with death was called off indefinitely. His executioners could not find a vein to plant intravenous shunts, and they prodded him with needles at least 18 times to no avail, says Tim Sweeney, his lawyer.

The eyes of the world are on Ohio now, and many are questioning our death-penalty apparatus.

ACLU of Ohio Volunteer Attorney Jeffrey Gamso discusses in Newsweek why Ohio must immediately stop all executions following the failed execution of Romell Broom.

Can a vein save a convicted killer? It the case of Romell Broom—it might. Broom was sentenced to death for raping and murdering 14-year-old Tryna Middleton on Sept. 21, 1984. Broom isn’t supposed to be alive to witness the 25th anniversary of Middleton’s death—but he is. Last Tuesday, the execution team at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility spent several hours trying unsuccessfully to find a viable vein for a lethal injection. Now, Ohio is faced with the difficult task of determining whether it can try to execute Broom a second time, after it botched the first attempt.

[…]

This may be the first time in Ohio history that an execution was halted and rescheduled—but it’s not the first time the state has had trouble administering a lethal injection. Ohio has had at least two other executions in the past three years that didn’t go according to plan. In 2006 it took prison officials 87 minutes to execute Joseph Clark, and in 2007 an execution team struggled for one hour and 53 minutes before Christopher Newton was pronounced dead. The process should run about 18 minutes, said Jeff Gamso, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. “Ohio is incapable of consistently and reliably finding a way to perform lethal injections competently,” Gamso said.

There is only one U.S. Supreme Court case that addresses the issue of failed executions. In 1946, Willie Francis was set to be electrocuted for murdering a drugstore owner, but there were problems with the electrical current, and Francis did not die. He returned to death row for almost a year while the court considered whether a second electrocution was constitutional. In a 5-4 ruling, the court held that a second execution did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. In the case of Francis, it was unclear how much pain he experienced from the first execution attempt. Broom will have to argue the stress, pain, and trauma of the lethal injection procedure was substantial.

On Friday, Judge Frost of the Federal District Court for Southern Ohio granted Romell Broom a temporary restraining order preventing the state from executing him for another 10 days. The state agreed to this order and will not contest it.

A federal district court has temporarily halted the second execution attempt of an Ohio inmate scheduled for Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost issued a temporary restraining order Friday. The ruling against the state is effective for 10 days and prevents the second lethal injection attempt on Romell Broom from going forward.

[…]

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed a public records request with the state in an attempt to learn information about the preparation for the first attempt, details about the attempt and information about preparations for the next scheduled attempt. The Ohio Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers sent Strickland a letter Thursday asking him to place a moratorium on Ohio executions given Tuesday’s events.

The City Beat takes a holistic view of the capital punishment system in light of the recent botched execution and other troubling statistics.

Released Monday, the FBI’s annual crime report for last year further underscores the fact that imposing capital punishment on criminals doesn’t act as a deterrent to homicides.

The report, Crime in the United States 2008, reveals that in 13 of the 14 states that didn’t have the death penalty last year, the murder rate was below the national rate of 5.4 homicides per 100,000 people.

In the state that was the sole exception to the trend, Michigan, the homicide rate was equal to the national rate.

The states with the highest murder rates in 2008 were in the Deep South.

[…]

The ACLU wants Strickland to issue a moratorium pending a review of Ohio’s execution procedures.

“If the state is going to take a person’s life, they must ensure that it is done as humanely as possible,” said Carrie Davis, an Ohio ACLU attorney. “With three botched executions in as many years, it’s clear that the state must stop and review the system entirely before another person is put to death.”

It was a troubling week for opponents of the death penalty in Ohio after another botched execution. Now, courts and officials debate whether they can try to execute Romell Broom again.

As executioners poked his limbs with an IV needle, Romell Broom initially tried to speed along his own demise, flexing his arm and tugging on a rubber tourniquet to better expose a vein on the inside of his elbow.

[…]

“Ohio has a history here. It’s not just him. He’s the third guy in three years where we’ve had essentially variations on the same problem,” said Jeff Gamso, volunteer attorney and former legal director for the ACLU of Ohio. He was referring to the executions of Joseph Clark in 2006 and Christopher Newton in 2007 in which prison workers took more than an hour and two hours, respectively, to kill the inmates because of trouble locating veins.

Debate is still ongoing on whether or not EMTs should be part of executions in Ohio.

The Ohio EMS board has no authority over the emergency medical technicians who administer lethal drugs in state executions.

That’s the opinion board lawyer Heather R. Frient made public yesterday during the board’s meeting.

Board members asked Frient to determine whether these technicians were under their jurisdiction. Under state law, intermediate EMTs are not authorized to work with these drugs.

But these technicians are an exception, Frient said.

Frightening statistics showing that Ohio will execute a record number of people this year, and showing no signs of stopping any time in the future.

The state of Ohio is lining up death-row inmates for execution at a feverish pace not seen here since capital punishment was reinstated a decade ago.

Having already carried out three executions since June, the state has scheduled at least one lethal injection every month through the end of the year.

That could mean that by year’s end, Ohio will have executed eight men in the final seven months of 2009. The previous high was seven in all of 2004.

A great victory for ensuring that the guilty are sentenced, rather than those who may be innocent.

A death row inmate scheduled for execution in September will get a chance to convince a judge that information discovered after his conviction could have exonerated him.

Romell Broom, 53, was sentenced to death in 1985 for the rape and murder of 14-year-old Tryna Middleton. Tryna, a ninth-grader at Shaw High School in East Cleveland, had been walking home with friends from a Friday night football game when she was abducted at knife point and forced into his car.

The 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that 165 pages of records from the East Cleveland Police Department can be presented to the original trial court as possible grounds for a new trial.