Killing study of the death penalty in Ohio

With many thanks to Chris Geidner at LawDork for the pointer, it now appears that the bill to study the death penalty in Ohio, which a bi-partisan coalition of representatives supported in the Ohio House, will not make it out of the Ohio Senate.  Coverage in the Other Paper and the Toledo Blade and the Cincinnati Inquirer explains why the bill (previously discussed here and here) will not even get to be debated in the Ohio Senate.

Chris has some appropriately biting commentary about this development here, and I share his disappointment in the unwillingness of Ohio Senate President Doug White to allow the bill to even come up for a vote in the Senate.  In this story, White is quoted as saying "I'm comfortable with where we are and how the death penalty's worked in Ohio. I don't think we've abused it."   But two-thirds of the Ohio House indicated it would just like a study of Ohio's capital punishment system so that everyone can be so "comfortable" with Ohio's machinery of death.  The bill, it must be recalled, simply provided for a study and did not call for any changes while the system was being examined.

Notably, as the study noted here reveals, Ohio in 2004 is second only to Texas in the number of executions.  As an Ohio citizen, I really wish the state would be willing to take a closer look at the killings it is doing on my behalf (even if only to make sure that the expensive death penalty system is a good use of my Ohio tax dollars).