The 138 males currently on death row at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution might see their execution dates pushed back or eliminated, opponents of capital punishment are saying.
The last one to leave the institution’s death row, Dennis McGuire, a 53-year-old man convicted of murder in 1989, became famous on Jan. 16 when his execution took 26 minutes, and prompted McGuire’s family to file a federal lawsuit the next day due to McGuire’s alleged suffering.
“Ohio is considered across the country as a high-use state (of the death penalty),” said Mike Brickner, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. “We have the death penalty, and we execute a large number of people.”
The ability to carry through with planned executions became compromised after European-based drug manufacturers refused to deliver drugs such as pentobarbital to high-use states like Ohio.
This led state correctional facilities to combine a sedative called midazolam with a painkiller, hydromorphone, to continue with scheduled deaths.
The next man to leave the Chillicothe Correctional Institute was intended to be 52-year-old Gregory Lott, who was convicted of murder.
Lott is scheduled to be executed March 19 at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. He is one of five men scheduled to be executed this year.
His attorneys filed a lawsuit last Thursday, which might push his execution back, Brickner said. The same week, the ACLU of Ohio sent a letter of complaint to Gov. John Kasich demanding an “immediate halt to executions in Ohio.”
“The ACLU has been asking this for 10 years, we’ve had four executions botched since then,” Brickner said. “With that kind of track record, now is an appropriate time to re-examine protocols and identify something that will work better.”
Lethal injection was first offered in Ohio in 1993 as an alternative to the electric chair. By 2001, the electric chair was removed and lethal injection became the only way a prisoner could be executed in Ohio, according to Ohioans to Stop Executions data.
The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections was unable to cite whether Ohio’s death penalty could be seeing its end, or if Lott’s lawsuit had merit, due to “pending litigation on the issue,” spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said, adding that there will be little comment from the ODRC until its own research is concluded.
“It would be premature to comment further until that review is completed,” Smith said in an email. “I would expect it to be completed before the scheduled execution in March.”
However, The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Jan. 27 that one of McGuire’s attorneys had been temporarily suspended after allegations that McGuire had been coached to “fake his own suffering.” Initial reviews failed to find substantial evidence of the accusation.
Ohio experienced allegations of botched executions in 2006 when prisoner Joseph Clark died 90 minutes after his execution by lethal injection began. A year later, prisoner Christopher Newton died two hours after the start of his execution. In 2009, prisoner Romell Broom became the first person to survive lethal injection after his scheduled death took more than two hours and failed.
The ACLU also filed complaints to the state on these occasions.
“Lethal injection isn’t the only problem with the death penalty; there are problems with how people get convicted,” Brickner said. “There are problems with convicting people who are seriously mentally ill to be executed.”
Despite national controversy after McGuire’s execution, Missouri carried on with the execution of prisoner Herbert Smulls on Wednesday morning without complication, using a non-FDA approved form of pentobarbital.
Athens County Prosecutor Keller Blackburn said it’s too early to tell whether capital punishment will be put on pause, or end entirely, due to Ohio’s most recent execution.
“It’s the law in the state of Ohio, so that’s what we operate on,” Blackburn said, adding that no one has been sentenced to death in Athens County in the last five years. “I can’t predict the future,” he said.
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