Gov. Kasich has granted clemency sparingly to convicted criminals

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

Gov. John Kasich used his executive clemency power during his first term far less frequently than any other Ohio governor in the past three decades, records show.

Kasich, a Republican, granted 66 of 1,521 requests, or about 4.4 percent of the non-death-penalty cases he received and acted upon from 2011 to 2014, according to records obtained by The (Columbus) Dispatch (http://bit.ly/18HbEIl ) under a public-records request.

That makes him the most conservative with clemency of any Ohio governor going back to the 1980s, when the state began tracking gubernatorial clemency, the newspaper said.

Kasich commuted the death sentences of five killers during his first term, but allowed 12 to be executed. He recently used his executive authority to push the state’s entire execution schedule into 2016 to allow the Ohio prisons agency to obtain new drugs for lethal injection.

Clemency is a power unique to governors, broad but defined by law. In Ohio, the governor can halt or postpone executions, commute or reduce a sentence so that a prisoner can be freed now or in the future, and grant pardons, erasing a past criminal record.

Ohio governors have used clemency in different ways over the past three decades reflecting personal ideological persuasions.