Trumbull prosecutor seeking Supreme Court action to allow Lorraine execution

By MARC KOVAC

news@vindy.com

COLUMBUS

Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins has asked Gov. John Kasich and Attorney General Mike DeWine to seek a U.S. Supreme Court decision to allow the execution of Charles Lorraine.

Watkins sent a letter to Kasich today, a day after a panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the state’s motion to lift a stay on Lorraine’s lethal injection put into place by federal district Judge Gregory Frost. The judge delayed the execution after the state again failed to follow its own written procedures when putting inmates to death.

“Regrettably, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has turned a blind eye to this miscarriage of justice and has refused to overturn Frost’s stay,” Watkins wrote.

DeWine said his office is reviewing the decision and determining a next legal move.

“Our work on this continues this weekend,” he told The Vindicator in a phone interview tonight. “We’ll have something to announce early next week.”

State and federal courts are closed Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“We have great concern for the victims’ families in this case and in all capital cases,” DeWine said. “I’m very concerned that the law be followed and executions in this case and other cases be carried out as expeditiously as possible. That is what our concern is, and that is my prime objective. We are still in the process of reviewing how best to achieve these objectives.”

Lorraine received the death penalty for the brutal 1986 murder of Raymond and Doris Montgomery. He stabbed them both multiple times before ransacking their Warren home and using the money and personal items he stole to buy drinks for friends at a bar.

Kasich denied clemency for Lorraine, setting the stage for his execution on Wednesday.

But Frost, in a scathing decision the following day, said the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction did not follow its own written procedures for putting inmates to death, even after promising the court that it would.

For the complete story, read Sunday's Vindicator or Vindy.com.