Capital punishment in Ohio

Capital offenses

A charge of aggravated murder with death penalty specifications may occur with at least one of the following special circumstances:

1. The murder was the assassination of the president of the United States or person in line of succession to the presidency, or of the governor or lieutenant governor of Ohio, or of the president-elect or vice president-elect of the United States, or of the governor-elect of Ohio, or of a candidate for any of the foregoing offices.
2. The murder was committed for hire.
3. The murder was committed for the purpose of escaping detection, apprehension, trial, or punishment for another offense committed by the offender.
4. The murder was committed while the offender was under detention or while the offender was at large after having broken detention.
5. Prior to the murder, the offender was convicted of a previous offense having as an essential element the purposeful killing of or attempt to kill another, or the current offense was part of a course of conduct involving the offender's purposeful killing of or attempt to kill two or more persons.
6. The victim was a law enforcement officer, and the offender knew or reasonably should have known that fact, and the officer was either performing duties or the offender acted with the specific purpose of killing such officer.
7. The murder was committed while the offender was committing, attempting to commit, or fleeing immediately after committing or attempting to commit kidnapping, rape, aggravated arson, aggravated robbery, or aggravated burglary, and either the offender was the principal offender in the commission of the aggravated murder or, if not the principal offender, committed the aggravated murder with prior planning.
8. The victim was a witness who was purposely killed by the offender either to prevent the victim from testifying, or in retaliation for prior testimony.
9. The offender, in the commission of the murder, purposefully caused the death of another who was under 13 years of age at the time of the commission of the offense, and either the offender was the principal offender in the commission of the offense or, if not the principal offender, committed the offense with prior planning.
10. The offense was committed while the offender was committing, attempting to commit, or fleeing immediately after committing or attempting to commit terrorism.

Legal process

When the prosecution seeks the death penalty, the sentence is decided by the jury and must be unanimous.

In case of a hung jury during the penalty phase of the trial, a life sentence is issued, even if a single juror opposed death (there is no retrial).

The power of clemency belongs to the governor of Ohio, after receiving a non-binding recommendation from the Ohio Parole Board.

Locations and method

Executions in Ohio are currently performed at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. Since January 2012, death row for the majority of male inmates is located at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution (CCI) in Chillicothe. A few high security male death row inmates are held at the Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) in Youngstown. Condemned female inmates are housed at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville and death row inmates with serious medical conditions are held at the Franklin Medical Center in Columbus. Prior to this, most male death row inmates were held at OSP with a few being held at the Mansfield Correctional Institution in Mansfield. The move to CCI allows the units at OSP and Mansfield to be used to separate violent inmates from the general population and will provide increased security and reduce transportation costs to both the execution chamber at SOCF and to the Franklin Medical Center for inmate medical treatment.

The Los Angeles Times noted in October 2009 that Ohio had three botched executions by lethal injection since 2006 - Joseph Lewis Clark, Christopher Newton and Romell Broom.

In November 2009, Ohio announced that it would only use a single drug for lethal injections, consisting of a single dose of Sodium thiopental, the first state to do so. The first single drug execution was that of Kenneth Biros, 51, on Tuesday, December 8, 2009. Biros was convicted of murdering 22-year-old Tami Engstrom near Masury, Ohio in 1991. Biros' counsel indicated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that Biros' execution, given that it is the first of its kind, may amount to "human experimentation." Various appeals for clemency were ultimately denied. Ohio announced in January 2011 that it will change the drug used from sodium thiopental to pentobarbital, as the availability of sodium thiopental has become quite scarce. The first execution using pentobarbital, was that of Johnnie Baston, on March 10, 2011.

On July 1, 2011, Lundbeck, the Danish pharmaceutical company that holds the sole license to manufacture pentobarbital in the United States, announced that its distributors would deny distribution of pentobarbital to U.S. prisons that carry out the death penalty by lethal injection. Ohio used up its supply of pentobarbital on September 25, 2013, with the execution of Harry Mitts Jr. On January 16, 2014, Ohio executed Dennis McGuire who was convicted of raping and then murdering 22 year old Joy Stewart who was 30 weeks pregnant, became the first U.S. inmate to be executed with a combination of the drugs midazolam and hydromorphone. The effects of this combination of drugs on the body are controversial and not well understood. McGuire took 25 minutes to die, an unusually long time for an execution, being among the longest since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999.

Postponements

In January 2015, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction announced that all executions scheduled for the remainder of that year would be postponed due to the lack of availability of required drugs. In October 2015, the department further announced that Governor John Kasich had granted additional reprieves to all inmates due to be executed in 2016 for the same reason. Ohio currently (as of March 2016) has no executions scheduled until January 2017.

Earlier history

Prior to 1885, executions were carried out by hanging in the county where the crime was committed. The Northwest Territory's first criminal statutes, also known as Marietta Code, date from 1788, 15 years before Ohio's statehood in 1803. These statutes did not ensure yet any uniform means of execution, nor did they designate where the executions were to take place. The statutory change from 1815 had executions as to be carried out locally and required the local sheriff to be also the local executioner, and in his absence or in any case of him being impeded, the local coroner would have to substitute him. That ordeal appears to be the first statewide attempt to ensure uniform means of execution and to designate where such executions were to take place, but it also appears to just turn into protocol and procedure by law a practice which had institutionalized even before Ohio's statehood in 1803.

In 1885, the legislature enacted a law that required executions to be carried out at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus by hanging, and law handed the executioner's job to the penitentiary's warden. This practice of naming the State Prison's warden executioner seems to have penetrated deeply into the 20th Century, as we can learn from the 1938 death sentence against Anna Marie Hahn. In 1897 the gallows were replaced by the electric chair, which was considered to be a more technologically advanced and humane method of execution. Ohio also became the second state to use the electric chair. 28 hangings, and 315 electrocutions were carried out at the now defunct Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus from 1885 to 1963.