Death Penalty

Where a person comes down on the issue of the death penalty depends on what justice looks like to them. The answer isn’t that simple.

Weeks before calling to abolish capital punishment in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine commuted the man's death sentence to life in prison without parole.

Ohio’s attorney general said he will continue to uphold the state’s death penalty law, in spite of a call for abolishment of the capital punishment from Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed him AG.

In 1981, the longtime elected official, then an Ohio Senate member, voted for the law to reinstate the death sentence. Decades later, DeWine has changed his mind.

Ohio’s death row wait time now stretches longer than 22 years, with more and more inmates dying from natural causes—or by suicide—than from a sentence.

Ohio has executed 56 men since 1981 and vacated the convictions of 12 other men. Over the course of five decades, that’s a roughly 1-in-5 executed-to-exonerated ratio.

Ohio has not gone through with an execution since July 2018, closing in on eight years, and extending the entirety of Gov. Mike DeWine’s tenure.

Nearly half of Ohio lawmakers who are still alive from the General Assembly that passed the death penalty statute have signed onto a letter calling for a repeal of the law they helped create.

The standstill is due in part to pharmaceutical companies’ opposition to use of their products in the drug concoction that creates a lethal injection in Ohio.

Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has extended the state's unofficial death penalty moratorium once again with the postponements of three more executions scheduled for this year.