Death row inmate set for clemency hearing

Benner could become the 20th person executed by the state since 1999.
By JEFF ORTEGA
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
COLUMBUS -- Glenn Benner isn't asking the state to spare his life, but a public hearing on clemency for the condemned inmate will be held anyway.
The Ohio Parole Board has scheduled a clemency hearing for Tuesday despite Benner's refusal to seek mercy.
Benner is scheduled to die by lethal injection Feb. 7 at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville after criminal convictions for two killings in the mid-1980s.
After the hearing, the parole board will deliberate and give a recommendation on clemency to Gov. Bob Taft, who has the final decision, said Andrea Dean, a parole board spokeswoman.
In a letter to an assistant Ohio attorney general, the 43-year-old Benner says he doesn't believe the clemency process considers whether a person has changed behind bars.
"I know that I have changed, and I am now a new person, but sadly I am unable to change the past so there does not seem to be point [sic] in participating in such a hearing," Benner wrote in the Dec. 28 letter to Michael L. Collyer, an assistant attorney general.
Benner also wrote that his seeking clemency "would add further stress to those already suffering because of my actions, and I do not want to do this to anyone."
No presentation
Benners' lawyers are not scheduled to make a presentation to the parole board, Dean said.
Benner, of Summit County, who is on death row at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown, has been imprisoned since 1986.
He was convicted of multiple charges including aggravated murder in the deaths of Cynthia Sedgwick in August 1985 near the Blossom Music Center in northeast Ohio and Trina Bowser in Akron in January 1986.
Investigators said Bowser's body was discovered in the trunk of a burning car.
He also pleaded guilty in Portage County Common Pleas Court to an abduction charge with an attack on 19-year-old Beth Ann Olenick in Randolph Township.
"The state strongly opposes any type of commutation of Glenn Benner's sentence because there are no grounds on which to do so," Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh wrote to the parole board. "Benner's execution should take place as scheduled."
His statement
Benner has declined to talk to reporters except to release a statement:
"Out of respect for the Bowser and Sedgwick families, my loved ones, others that I have hurt, and especially Trina and Cynthia, I will not comment further other than I underestimated the power of drugs and in doing so I committed horrific crimes and caused untold and unimaginable pain to many people -- both to people who knew and loved me, and to people to whom I was a terrifying, dangerous stranger."
In his statement, Benner said he would address the victims' families at his scheduled execution.
Mark Rickel, a spokesman for Taft, said the Republican governor will study Benner's case and make a decision on his fate after the parole board forwards its report and recommendation.
The governor could reject clemency or commute the sentence to life in prison without parole, life in prison with eligibility for parole or to an outright release from prison, state officials say.
Benner would be the 20th person in Ohio to be executed since the state resumed carrying out executions in 1999, prisons officials say.