Convicted killer on suicide watch in Youngstown

April 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

YOUNGSTOWN

The next inmate to be executed in Ohio is getting heightened security at the Ohio State Penitentiary this weekend as the state tries to avoid another suicide attempt on death row.

The move has drawn concerns from a civil liberties group that says the new policy goes too far.

Serial rapist Darryl Durr, scheduled to die Tuesday by lethal injection for strangling a 16-year-old girl in suburban Cleveland in 1988, is under a 72-hour watch at the prison on the city’s East Side.

The watch has been standard procedure. But now his cell includes a Plexiglas-like door so guards can keep him under better surveillance, prisons spokeswoman Julie Walburn said.

Also, his bed lacks springs, which could be used to harm himself, and he can’t have physical contact with visitors, such as hand touching or kissing.

Mental-health staff will evaluate whether Durr can have certain personal items, including shoestrings, or leave his cell for recreation, Walburn said.

The moves are in response to the March 7 attempted suicide of Lawrence Reynolds, an inmate who overdosed on an antidepressant hours before he was to be transferred from Youngstown to the Southern Ohio Correction Facility in Lucasville, which houses the state’s death chamber.

Reynolds, who recovered in a hospital and was executed a week later, had “cheeked” prescribed medication, stockpiled the tablets in his cell and may have obtained additional pills from another inmate, according to a subsequent investigation.

Suicide attempts on death row, while rare, do happen. Ohio’s policy seems in line with higher security measures enforced in other states, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a group opposed to capital punishment.

In Louisiana, where executions are less frequent, some of the formality is broken when the warden joins the condemned inmate and his family for a final meal a few hours before the execution, said prisons spokesman Gary Young. Warden Burl Cain dined with convicted murder Gerald Bordelon in January before the state executed him — its first execution since 2002.

Ohio’s changes come as the state Supreme Court has scheduled one execution per month through November, putting Ohio on pace to execute a record 11 inmates this year.

“We’re hearing from inmates’ lawyers that the conditions now are very, very grim,” said Christine Link, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. “The inmates have lost almost all privileges to do anything, making living quite unpleasant in this effort to keep them alive until the state can kill them.”