Anti-execution campaign shouldn't sway Strickland
A relatively small group of opponents to Ohio's death penalty is attempting to circumvent state law by mounting a letter-writing campaign to Gov. Ted Strickland urging him to end capital punishment in the state.
If they want Ohio to be free of the death penalty, there is a way of doing that: Mount an effort to get the General Assembly to change the law. If the Legislature is not amenable to such a change -- and there is no indication that it is -- the next step is to elect legislators who run on anti-capital punishment platforms.
Misguided effort
The effort to short-circuit the law (which would be a bad pun if Ohio still had the electric chair) is misguided on several points.
First, when Strickland ran for governor, his stated position was in favor of the death penalty. To switch now would be a break of faith with the electorate.
Second, foes of the death penalty have a particularly bad poster boy in the person of Kenneth Biros, who is scheduled to be executed in little over a month, on March 20. Biros has avoided justice for far too long. It has been 16 years since he beat, stabbed and strangled 22-year-old Tami Engstrom of Brookfield Township. He tried to hide his crime by dismembering her body, scattering parts in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Third, the record shows that Ohio is more than deliberate in its administration of the death penalty. As we noted when discussing this issue last month, a death row inmate in Ohio is just as likely to die of natural causes in prison as he is to be executed. The 2005 attorney general's report on the status of Ohio prisoners awaiting the death penalty showed that 19 inmates have been executed since 1981 and 19 have died of natural causes while serving time on death row.
First among many
Biros is presently first in line to be executed in Ohio, although he is by no means the senior resident among the 200 inmates on death row. Another particularly vicious Trumbull County murderer, Danny Lee Hill, was sentenced to death Feb. 28, 1986, for murdering young Raymond Fife.
The Associated Press reported over the weekend that Strickland has received 125 letters or e-mails from death penalty opponents, while 27 letters urged Strickland to keep the death penalty in place.
Those numbers would indicate that for every five people opposed to the death penalty, only one favors it. But any realist -- and we consider Gov. Strickland a realist -- knows that those numbers don't hold. If they did, the Legislature would be rushing to abolish the death penalty.
Barring a federal court injunction against Biros' execution, he should go to the death chamber on March 20. The Ohio Parole Board recommended against clemency for Biros shortly after Strickland took office. The new governor said, however, that he would have to carefully study the record himself before signing Biros' death warrant.
Strickland has had time to do so. The record is clear. Whether the governor receives 125 letters or 125,000 letters shouldn't change Kenneth Biros' execution date.