News & Commentary

It s

As l

This is the third in a series of posts focusing on issues we will be tackling at the 2014 ACLU of Ohio biennial conference, Resist. Reclaim. Restore Your Rights!

Ohio

On Saturday, November 2, 2013, a coalition of faith groups, unions, professional associations, community groups, and rights organizations (including the ACLU of Ohio) held a rally at the Ohio Statehouse.

On Saturday, November 2, 2013 a coalition of faith groups, unions, professional associations, community groups, and rights organizations (including the ACLU of Ohio) will hold a rally at the Ohio Statehouse. At this rally, we will call on Ohio lawmakers to halt the death penalty, end the war on drugs and the epidemic of mass incarceration, break the many reentry barriers for the formerly incarcerated, and put a stop to "stand your ground" proposals in Ohio. In advance of the rally, the ACLU of Ohio will be blogging about each of these four important issues. In this post, staff member Nick Worner writes about the need to abolish the death penalty. There are plenty of experts who can throw a mountain of statistics at you, but it only takes a few key pieces of information to conclude that capital punishment is a fundamentally flawed concept. Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeiffer (the architect of our state’s modern death penalty system) really summed the whole thing up when he explained that the system he helped design has become little more than a “death lottery.” He famously turned against capital punishment when he became convinced that death sentences have less to do with the actual offense, and more to do with race, socioeconomic class, and the location of the crime. But if Pfeiffer’s arguments aren’t enough to convince you, simply consider the number of innocent Americans who have become ensnared in the bureaucracy of death. Since 1973, 142 men have been released from death row. Take a moment and repeat that number out loud. Not one, not ten, but one hundred and forty two men were once waiting in line to die for crimes they did not commit. Beyond questions of race or class, there is an ever-present risk inherent in putting other human beings to death. Eventually, we will execute an innocent person. In all likelihood, it has already happened. Add it all up and you have a system that cannot be applied fairly, does very little to deter violent crime, and runs a near-constant risk of ensnaring the innocent. All of this before we even begin to discuss the very real administrative problems with the application of the death penalty, problems that often make executions operate less like justice and more like torture. In Ohio alone, there were three botched executions in three years, culminating in Romell Broom’s 2009 execution, which was suspended after officials had spent hours probing unsuccessfully for a vein to inject with poison. These fiascoes, combined with litigation, led to a de-facto moratorium on executions for more than a year. Ohio eventually restarted executions after revamping procedures and switching to new drugs to carry out lethal injections. Now these new execution drugs are no longer available, and major concerns have been raised about what will replace them. Meanwhile, Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor has been leading a long term task force to examine whether Ohio’s death penalty is fairly applied. Now more than ever, Ohioans have an opportunity to step back and assess our state’s long, counterproductive relationship with capital punishment. Join us on November 2 as we stand on the side of justice at the Ohio Statehouse and call on lawmakers to stop tweaking the machinery of death and ask them to start shutting it down altogether.

This ACLU of Ohio Op/Ed originally appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on 9/30/2013 On Sept. 11, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction revealed that prison inmate James Blackburn committed suicide while in prison. Blackburn’s death followed the more high-profile suicides of Ariel Castro and Billy Slagle weeks before and marked the eighth suicide in Ohio prisons in 2013. Last week, officials released a preliminary report on the death of Billy Slagle that found that the electronic log maintained by one of the corrections officers monitoring Slagle was falsified, and that nearly three-fourths of corrections officers on duty were “relief” officers not fully trained to work in high-security settings like Death Row. Director Gary Mohr has rightfully embraced new practices such as supervisors verifying with video surveillance that corrections officers complete their rounds, and ensuring relief officers have necessary training.

Please note: These documents are for historical and research purposes only and may not reflect the most current execution protocols in the state of Ohio.