(The Center Square) – Nearly 30 former lawmakers who helped bring back the death penalty to Ohio 44 years ago now want it to end.
Twenty-seven members of 114th General Assembly who passed legislation four decades ago to restore capital punishment signed a letter Monday in support of the current Senate Bill 133, which would stop the death penalty.
That bill is in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“We understand this broken death penalty system’s grievous flaws, its unintended consequences, and its failure to achieve the benefits we had intended,” the letter reads.
Marge Koosed, professor emerita at the University of Akron Law School, interviewed 44 of the 57 surviving members from the 114th General Assembly.
“Only five of them expressed continued support for the current death penalty system,” Koosed said. “The rest now believe ending the death penalty is appropriate, and everyone I interviewed agrees it is not working as they expected.”
The letter comes a little more than a week after Attorney General Dave Yost told lawmakers in the House of Representatives victims should be the top priority and called the state’s capital punishment system costly and long broken, adding it shows “a dishonorable abdication of responsibility.”
Yost said all that while pushing for a bill that would approve the use of nitrogen hypoxia for executions in the state.
“An additional method of execution is necessary,” Yost recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of House Bill 36.
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine began a moratorium on Ohio executions in 2019 when he first took office and has said he does not expect any to take place throughout the end of his term in 2027.
In 2020, DeWine said the state could not get lethal injection drugs and told lawmakers they would have to find a different method to put inmates to death.
The state’s last execution came July 18, 2018, when Robert Van Hook was put to death by lethal injection for killing a man he met at a Cincinnati bar in 1985.
From 1981 through the end of last year, 336 people have received a combined 341 death sentences, according to Yost’s Capital Crime Report presented earlier this year. Fifty-six of those have been carried out.
There are 119 inmates on death row.
