Ohio should suspend death penalty, ABA says

Ohio prosecutors blasted the review.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Ohio’s death penalty system is so flawed it should be suspended immediately while the state conducts a thorough review of its fairness and accuracy, a team of lawyers concluded in a study released Monday.

The system is full of racial and geographic imbalances, too many defendants don’t get adequate legal help, and too many protections of offenders’ rights are absent from the capital punishment process, according to a 30-month review of Ohio’s death penalty system by the American Bar Association.

The review said Ohio met only four of 93 ABA recommendations to ensure a fair death penalty system. The ABA team asked Gov. Ted Strickland to halt executions to allow a review of the system.

“Regardless of one’s views of the morality of the death penalty, it is beyond question that if Ohio is to have a death penalty it needs to be one that is fair, accurate and provides due process to all capital defendants and those on death row,” said Phyllis Crocker, a Cleveland State University law professor and member of the Ohio review team.

“Unfortunately, this is not the case,” she said.

Strickland spokesman Keith Dailey said the governor is reviewing the report, which runs almost 500 pages.

Criticism

Prosecutors lambasted the review, with spokesman John Murphy calling it a “mugging of our justice system in Ohio.”

“The claims are unsupported and the recommendations are a defense lawyer’s wish list,” said Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association.

“We spend tons of money providing representation,” Murphy said. “The cases are litigated over and over again.”

He said the 10-person ABA panel was dominated by death-penalty opponents. Of the group, four, including Crocker, are or have been capital defense attorneys. A fifth lawyer, Mark Godsey, directs a University of Cincinnati program that seeks to apply DNA evidence to clear people who are wrongly convicted.

Another member, Rep. Shirley Smith, a Cleveland Democrat, has tried repeatedly to pass a bill to study Ohio’s death penalty system.

Other members are U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Democrat and former Cuyahoga County prosecutor; former Ohio Supreme Court justice Craig Wright, a Republican; U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mertz; and Geoffrey Mearns, dean of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

Mearns is a former assistant U.S. attorney general who prosecuted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols.

Though the other members of the panel called for a suspension of executions, Mearns and Mertz abstained from calling for a moratorium. Mertz said he couldn’t take that position as a judge who oversees death-penalty cases. Mearns said he would have needed more information about specific death-penalty cases to call for a freeze.

Views not a factor

Michael Greco, a former ABA president who announced the panel’s results, said he didn’t know members’ positions on capital punishment and it wasn’t a factor in their selection.

“Whether we agree or disagree with the death penalty, we must insist that everyone who is accused, tried, convicted and sentenced to death has been given justice,” Greco said.

Among other findings, the ABA concluded:

UThe state’s system is flawed by racial disparities in death penalty sentencing, including a greater likelihood of defendants’ being sentenced to death if a victim is white.

UThere are major differences in how counties sentence death-row cases. A defendant in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, for example, is far more likely to receive a death sentence than a defendant in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland. The ABA based this conclusion on results of a 2005 study of the death penalty system by The Associated Press.

UThe state’s appeals system does not allow for a meaningful comparison of cases to determine if a defendant deserves a death sentence based on other similar cases.

The 2005 AP study found that people in Ohio facing a possible death penalty are twice as likely to be sentenced to death for killing a white person than a black person.

The study also found widespread geographic disparities and determined that one in every two death-penalty cases ended in plea deals to avoid a death sentence, including several cases with multiple victims.

The AP study looked at 1,936 capital indictments from 1981 through 2002. The ABA study only reviewed death sentences, which number fewer than 300 since 1981.

Ohio is the seventh of eight states being reviewed by the ABA. The other states: Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Arizona, Indiana and Tennessee. An ABA team is currently conducting a review in Pennsylvania.