Get executions back on track for Portage, Trumbull killers

Two noteworthy developments this week in Connecticut and Ohio reinforce the highly contentious debate over the death penalty.

In Connecticut, the state Legislature approved an outright abolition of capital punishment, making The Constitution State the 17th in the nation to outlaw the death penalty. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich denied clemency for a Portage County murderer after a federal judge ended a five-month moratorium on executions over legal complaints that Ohio had not followed its own lethal-injection protocol properly.

In Connecticut, we recognize the abolition of capital punishment as a predictable outcome for that region: Only one state in the entire Northeast — New Hampshire — continues to respect the logic behind the death penalty and keeps it on the books.

In Ohio, we welcome the developments as a sign that the state has learned from its past transgressions in the use of lethal injection and as a harbinger that this state will continue to maintain the death penalty for the worst of the worst of cold-blooded murderers.

As such, we hope the execution of Mark Wiles, a Portage County man who stabbed a 15-year-old boy to death during a farmhouse burglary in Rootstown in 1985, proceeds as scheduled Wednesday at Ohio’s Death Chamber in Lucasville.

Further, we hope lifting the moratorium will lead the state to end the stay of execution of Charles Lorraine of Warren, who originally was scheduled to die three months ago.

Lorraine, many will recall, savagely stabbed Raymond Montgomery, 77, five times with a butcher’s knife and then stabbed his wife, Doris, 80, nine times before burglarizing their Warren home in 1986. He then celebrated his depravity by buying rounds of drinks for his friends at a city tavern.

It’s now up to personnel in the Ohio Department of Correction and Rehabilitation to use extreme care to ensure proper protocols are assiduously followed next week when Wiles is lethally injected. That should not be too difficult as U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost, who imposed the moratorium last November, found only minor transgressions in the state’s procedures. For example, he cited the state’s failure to properly check a box on a medical form.

WATCH FOR PROTESTS

Of course, in the coming days and weeks, we expect the opponents of capital punishment — including the powerful and respected Roman Catholic Church — to decry anew the death penalty as a barbaric practice of state-sponsored killing and as an inhumane form of retribution.

The death penalty, however, is neither inhumane nor retributive. It is justice.

After all, executions primarily are not a transaction between a criminal and his victim, or the victim’s family. It is a process whereby the state seeks justice for the people of Ohio. And despite Judge Frost’s misgivings about the procedural aspects of the state’s system of lethal injection, he has never challenged the constitutionality of capital punishment — specifically that it is not cruel and unusual — in the Buckeye State to mete out justice.

The vast majority of Ohioans and Americans, according to credible public opinion polls, continues to concur by supporting the death penalty for the most egregious killers.

Both Mark Wiles and Charles Lorraine fit that mold. They are violent, vicious killers who committed vile and unspeakable acts against their chosen victims. The longer the state delays their legitimate and constitutional dates with death, the longer justice will be denied to the victims’ survivors and, more importantly, to the purity of jurisprudence in Ohio.