Warren killer Charles Lorraine skirts date with death today

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Charles Lorraine

By Marc Kovac

news@vindy.com

COLUMBUS

Charles Lorraine was supposed to make the trip to the Death House at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville on Tuesday for his scheduled execution.

Instead, the Warren man, sentenced to death for the 1986 knife killings of an elderly Warren couple, spent Tuesday and today in a cell at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown.

He’ll likely remain on death row, either in Youngstown or Chillicothe, the new home for such inmates, for the near future as state officials work through legal challenges to Ohio’s lethal-injection methods — specifically, whether the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction can convince a federal judge that it will follow state execution protocols.

The attorney general’s office was working Tuesday to file an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping justices there would overrule federal district Judge Gregory Frost, who stopped Lorraine’s execution last week after he said the state failed to follow its own written guidelines in the November execution of Reginald Brooks.

Prosecutors said the procedural issues outlined by Judge Frost were minor and should not delay Lorraine’s execution, and the attorney general’s office appealed the decision.

But the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Judge Frost.

Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins asked Attorney General Mike DeWine and Gov. John Kasich to pursue an emergency appeal of the decision late last week.

Lorraine received the death penalty for murdering Raymond and Doris Montgomery. Lorraine stabbed both multiple times before ransacking their Warren home and using the money he stole to buy drinks for friends at a bar.

“It has been a long road for the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office and the victims’ family seeking justice for Doris and Raymond Montgomery,” Watkins said in a statement Tuesday.

“With all our collective strength, we vigorously pursued to see that the family would see finality on Jan.18. Due to events beyond our local control, that will not happen.” He added, “Throughout the years, the attorney general’s office and the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office have worked together on many death-penalty cases successfully. These efforts will continue on the Lorraine prosecution and other pending cases.”

If successful before the U.S. Supreme Court, prosecutors would have to ask the Ohio Supreme Court to issue a new execution date for Lorraine, said Dan Tierney, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office.

Otherwise, the temporary restraining order on the execution will remain in place until Judge Frost lifts it.