Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter and writes from Ohio University.
Gov. Mike DeWine, the Cedarville Republican who will leave office Jan. 11, has revealed something that was long obvious: He opposes the death penalty.
The question is, where does that lead him, and Ohio, during the roughly six months he’ll continue to hold, in the Ohio Constitution’s words, the state’s supreme executive power? That includes the power of life or death over the 112 inmates on Ohio’s Death Row.
DeWine isn’t the first governor to struggle with Ohio’s death penalty. Gov. Michael V. DiSalle (1959-62), a Toledo Democrat, unsuccessfully sought its repeal. And as a demonstration of confidence that convicted murderers seldom killed again, “nine of the ten persons on the household staff of the [Governor’s Mansion, in Bexley, when DuSalle lived there] were convicted murderers,” the New York Times reported.
That DeWine, a committed Roman Catholic, has long questioned the death penalty was obvious during the long run-up to his announcement.
Still, there are ironies atop ironies: He was principal co-sponsor of Ohio’s current (1981) death penalty law. The lead sponsor was future Senate President Richard H. Finan, a Republican from suburban Cincinnati’s Evendale.
Although 16-year Republican Gov. James A. Rhodes, who unseated DiSalle in 1962, let two executions go forward early in 1963, his first year as governor, Ohio didn’t resume executions (after decades of delays) until the 1999-2006 administration of Republican Gov. Bob Taft (24 executions), followed by 18 under Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, and 15 under Republican Gov. John R. Kasich. None took place during John J. Gilligan’s (1971-74) or Richard F. Celeste’s (1983-90) Democratic administrations nor Republican George V. Voinovich’s 1991-98 administration.
Ohio hasn’t executed anybody since DeWine, once Greene County’s prosecuting attorney, was inaugurated as governor in January 2019. Term-limits require him to leave the governorship in six months.
GOP lawmakers support Ohio death penalty
House Speaker Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican likely to keep hold of the House gavel through 2032, has made it clear there’s no way House Republicans would repeal Ohio’s death penalty.
Huffman, a Notre Dame graduate, and the best friend Ohio’s parochial schools have ever had, might care to recall what the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” teaches, that “‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and [the church] works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
In fact, every European country except Belarus has abolished the death penalty, as have 23 states, and the District of Columbia, including Ohio neighbors Michigan (in 1846) and West Virginia (in 1965).
But for Ohio and Indiana, the remaining states carved out of the old Northwest Territory – besides Michigan, they are Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota – have abandoned the death penalty. And in Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro has continued a hold on executions begun by then-Gov. Tom Wolf (2015-22), and Shapiro has asked Pennsylvania’s General Assembly to repeal the death penalty altogether.
It appears DeWine, at this point, won’t issue a blanket commutation of all current Ohio death sentences to sentences of life-without-parole, but on a case-by-case basis. He did that with the initially unpublicized May commutation of the death sentence of Clevelander Gregory Lott to life without parole.
Lott had been convicted of the 1986 killing of East Clevelander John McGrath. DeWine, Cleveland.com’s Jeremy Pelzer reported, “cited a recent court ruling that while Lott is too intellectually disabled to qualify for a death sentence under current law, his sentence couldn’t be overturned because the issue had already been decided.”
So the question is whether the governor will commute more sentences (almost certainly yes) and whether he’ll do so inmate by inmate or in groups.
The governor, who’ll turn age 80 on Jan. 5, isn’t likely to run for office again, so however and whatever he does about death penalty inmates will be judged by history, not by voters. And on the death penalty, Mike DeWine is so far on the side of history – not of barbarism.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter and writes from Ohio University.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: In his final months, Gov. DeWine weighs life and death | Opinion
Reporting by Thomas Suddes, Columnist / The Columbus Dispatch
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By Thomas Suddes, Columnist | USA TODAY Network
