Why not let the inmate die?

COLUMBUS

One night last week, state prison officials rushed an inmate to the hospital after he tried to kill himself.

Doctors were able to counter the attempted drug overdose, and the inmate regained consciousness and was returned, a couple of days later, to prison.

That much of the story isn’t too out of the ordinary. Prisoners get sick all the time, whether at their own hands or otherwise.

But it’s definitely out of the ordinary — and perhaps represents the ultimate in irony — when the prisoner in question is hours away from his scheduled execution, and the state has to get him well enough to put him to death.

Such was the case with Lawrence Reynolds, the Summit County man who brutally murdered an elderly neighbor and received the death sentence for the crime.

Unconscious

Prison staff found Reynolds in his cell, unconscious, hours before he was supposed to be transported to the Death House at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. The suicide attempt pushed back Reynolds’ execution by one week.

The situation prompts all kinds of questions.

Like how could an inmate in one of the most secure prisons in the state, with a guard at the cell door and regular checks as part of a special 72-hour watch before his execution, manage to swallow enough pills to attempt suicide?

“Having worked in the prison system, I am hugely aware that the inmate population can be very creative in trying to break the rules and overcome the rules,” Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist, said last week in answer to that question. “It’s happened, but I think these kinds of occurrences, in terms of inmates passing medications and saving medications up and doing those kinds of things, is not a terribly rare thing to have happened.”

“Inmates on Death Row, obviously some of them are on medications of different kinds,” he added. “So I am speculating that they saved up their medications and gave it to this inmate so that he could have a sufficient amount to try to take an overdose. I’m not certain that’s how it happened... I’m speculating, but I’m speculating out of experience that that’s likely what happened.”

Then there’s the other obvious question: Why would the state work so hard to keep an inmate alive that it intends to turn around and put to death?

“There are ethics, and then there are legal considerations, certainly,” Strickland said. “It is ironic, obviously, that you would work to keep someone alive when they are scheduled to be executed. But I think the law apparently is very clear that the state has the obligation to attend to an inmate’s medical needs, even a condemned person, until such time as the date of execution occurs and they are in fact executed.”

He added, “So it is ironic, I will admit that. It’s a hugely unusual set of circumstances. But my obligation and I think the obligation of the state is to do everything that we can to observe the law as we understand it. And that’s what we’re doing in this case.”

Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. E-mail him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at Ohio Capital Blog.