The state’s outgoing Attorney General is again urging Ohio to resume executions, even though it is highly unlikely before the end of his term or Gov. Mike DeWine’s, reported Statehouse News Bureau.
Ohio’s
death row wait time now stretches longer than 22 years, with more and more
inmates dying from natural causes—or by suicide—than from a sentence, according
to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s mandatory 2025 capital punishment report.
The state ranks 12th of 28 states for its wait time.
“During my
years as attorney general, not a single sentence has been carried out—a mockery
of the justice system and of the dead and their families,” Yost writes in the
report, released Wednesday. “Yet other states, which get their life-ending
drugs from the same companies Ohio could, have found the will and a way to
carry out these sentences since 2019.”
The de
facto execution moratorium is closing in on eight years and extending the
entirety of Gov. Mike DeWine’s tenure. DeWine has delayed every scheduled one
since January 2019, some more than once, blaming pharmaceutical companies’
opposition to use of their products in the drug concoction that creates a
lethal injection.
But with
his time in office closing, DeWine has for months hinted at coming out against
capital punishment altogether. That announcement hasn’t come yet.
The
American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which opposes capital punishment, has
asked DeWine to grant some death row inmates clemency.
“There is
a real opportunity to address Ohio’s broken capital punishment system by
reviewing individual cases and commuting sentences before it’s too late,” ACLU
of Ohio Chief Policy and Advocacy Officer Jocelyn Rosnick wrote in an email
statement.
More than
100 men and one woman are incarcerated on death row in Ohio, according to
Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections data.
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