Ohio must find best route to restore death penalty

After a 3-year-long moratorium on capital punishment, will Ohio ever revive the practice of executing its most heinous cold-blooded murderers?

We and other proponents of keeping the death penalty as a viable punishment option in capital murder cases are beginning to wonder.

That’s because it’s been three years this month since Ohio began what was originally planned as a temporary delay in carrying out capital punishment. That came after the botched execution of Dennis McGuire, a Preble County man who raped, sodomized and murdered a 22-year-old pregnant woman in 1989.

McGuire, many will recall, endured a 26-minute cycle of repeated snorting, gurgling and gasping for air as the first death-row inmate in Ohio to be served a new lethal-drug cocktail.

In the intervening years, Ohio has struggled to find less painful methods and more easily available drugs for its lethal-injection executions. But just as a new three-drug mix used by other states was adopted and three long-delayed executions were rescheduled for the first few months of this year, along comes a federal judge to torpedo the plans.

THREE EXECUTIONS DELAYED

Magistrate Judge Michael Merz of U.S. District Court for Southern Ohio in Dayton last Thursday barred the state from executing murderers Ronald Phillips, Raymond Tibbetts and Gary Otte as scheduled early this year using the newly adopted three-drug protocol.

Judge Merz’s decision has left many of us, including Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins, scratching our heads.

“It makes no sense that Georgia and Texas are carrying out executions, and we can’t,” Watkins said.

The principal drug in question in the new cocktail that the judge targeted is midazolam, a sleep-inducing and anxiety-reducing sedative. In his ruling in the case filed by counsel for killers Phillips, Tibbetts and Otte, he argued, “The court concludes that use of midazolam as the first drug in Ohio’s present three-drug protocol will create a substantial risk of serious harm or an objectively intolerable risk of harm.”

His ruling is doubly perplexing, given that other states commonly use the drug, and other courts have upheld it as constitutional.

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision released in June 2015, ruled that Oklahoma’s use of midazolam did not violate the Eighth Amendment guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. The Dayton judge’s seeming disregard of this precedent from the highest court in the land proves puzzling indeed.

Legal officials within the Ohio Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction apparently feel likewise. They acted with jackrabbit speed late last week to file an appeal of Judge Merz’s ruling in the federal appeals court in Cincinnati.

Judges in that court should act with similar speed and alacrity to honor the Supreme Court’s decision and overturn Judge Merz’s decision so that the executions can proceed.

EXPLORE ALL OPTIONS

But in the event the decision is upheld, state officials should also explore alternative options by consulting other states that have execution methods that clearly have passed constitutional muster.

They must do so in order that capital punishment can be restored as expeditiously as possible to bring closure and justice to victims.

Too often, in the caustic debates over the death penalty, victims plus their family members and loved ones get short shrift.

In coming days and weeks, we expect more forces to use the judge’s decision as a springboard to decry the death penalty as a barbaric practice of state-sponsored killing and an inhumane 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.

The vast majority of Ohioans and Americans concur by supporting the death penalty for the most cruel and heartless killers. The state must respect that sentiment by working quickly to find a suitable execution solution.

The longer the state delays cold-blooded killers’ legitimate and constitutional dates with death, the longer justice will be denied to the victims’ survivors and to the purity of jurisprudence in Ohio.