TRUMBULL COUNTY Will Roberts end up on death row?

A Trumbull County judge also could sentence Roberts to life imprisonment.
CLEVELAND (AP) -- A 6-by-8-foot cell at Ohio's maximum-security prison for women awaits convicted killer Donna Roberts should she become the first woman sent to death row since former Gov. Richard Celeste commuted four inmates' sentences in 1991.
A Trumbull County jury last week recommended Roberts be executed, putting her closer to death row than any woman since Celeste granted the four women freedom two days before leaving office.
Three other women have been indicted on capital murder charges, but they still are awaiting trial, Ohio Public Defender David Bodiker said Monday.
Judge John Stuard of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court could accept the death-penalty recommendation or sentence Roberts to life in prison. Sentencing has not been scheduled.
Roberts, 59, of Howland Township, and Nathaniel Jackson, 29, of Youngstown, were accused of killing Roberts' ex-husband in 2001. Jackson, who also was convicted of aggravated murder, is appealing his death sentence.
The pair detailed their plans to kill Robert Fingerhut in hundreds of letters, written while Jackson was in prison on a previous conviction of receiving stolen property, prosecutors said.
During her trial, Roberts told reporters she wanted the death penalty.
Should the judge concur with the jury's recommendation, Roberts would be sent to the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, said Jo Ellen Culp, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections.
"She would not be housed among the general population. She would be in a single-person cell," Culp said.
Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, said Roberts would join a small number of women on death row around the nation.
"Sometimes it could be in a little sense worse if you're the only one," Dieter said. "Physical conditions aren't so bad, but you're more isolated than anybody. You just sit, and if you have no one else to even talk to, that can be a very torturous situation."
As of April, there were 48 women on death row in the United States, just over 1 percent of the 3,500 death-row inmates. Ten women have been executed in the United States since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, the center says.
The court had declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, saying it was applied too arbitrarily.
Courts have issued death sentences to nine Ohio women. Four had their sentences commuted to life in prison, including Rosalie Grant of Youngstown, convicted in 1983 for killing her two small sons by torching her house, and two convictions were reversed, says the public defender's office.
Three were electrocuted -- Anna Hahn in 1938, and Dovie Dean and Betty Butler in 1954, the Death Penalty Information Center said.
Three other Ohio women who face trials for murder charges are Elizabeth Pinks in Clark County, Tina Marie McDowell in Franklin County and Vickie Anderson in Stark County.