Potent(?) pace of executions in Ohio starting to produce pushback

This new article from the Columbus Dispatch, which is headlined "Death Row cases should be reviewed, justice says," highlights that some prominent folks are starting to take note and lament Ohio's recent record on administering the death penalty.  Here are excerpts from the article:

The "father of Ohio's death penalty," Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, says all current Death Row cases should be reviewed to see which ones warrant execution -- and which should be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

"There are probably few people in Ohio that are proud of the fact we are executing people at the same pace as Texas," Pfeifer told The Dispatch.  His comments came the day after the lethal injection of Michael Beuke, the fifth Ohioan executed this year and the 38th since 1999.

"When the next governor is sworn in," Pfeifer said, "I think the state would be well served if a blue-ribbon panel was appointed to look at all those cases.  The only reason we have a death penalty is society demands retribution. ... I never made the argument that it was a deterrent. You can't prove it with numbers."

Pfeifer, a Supreme Court justice for the past 17 years, was one of three Republican state senators who resurrected Ohio's death-penalty law in 1981 after the old law had been declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.  At the time, Pfeifer included a life without parole option in the law, but the Ohio House refused to go along.

Pfeifer, a Republican who is unopposed for re-election to a fourth term on the court this fall, emphasized that he is not suggesting that convicted killers are innocent, or that any should be set free. "The point is whether or not death is the appropriate penalty," he said.

Pfeifer said the majority of the old cases, had they been tried today under current law and societal standards, would not have resulted in capital punishment.  "The number of people we have accumulated on Death Row has been rather staggering," he said. "It's improbable that all of those folks are going to be executed."

With a high number of executions and relatively few new death sentences being handed out (one last year), Death Row has shrunk nearly 21 percent in Ohio, from a high of 203 prisoners in January 2002 to the current 161.  Six more executions are scheduled this year, and two have been set for 2011.

Ohio Public Defender Tim Young called Pfeifer's suggestion "a tremendous idea, one we would greatly encourage." "If people take the time to look at who's on Death Row, they will see types of cases that are so different because they are based on different sets of circumstances," Young said. "A person committing a crime in one part of the state might get the death penalty, and another person who committed a similar crime in another part of the state does not."...

"We as a society always have an evolving standard of justice and fairness," Young said. "What we thought of as justice in 1776 when we cut people's ears off is not the same today.  A decade ago, you could execute the mentally retarded."

Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray could not be reached for comment.

This article highlights the tendency of some folks to favor the death penalty more in theory than in reality.  Only a grand total of 38 persons have been executed in Ohio in the 30 years since then-legislator Pfeifer sought to bring the death penalty to the state.  If Pfeifer and others in Ohio still support the death penalty at all, I have a hard time understanding why the fact that the state is finally getting around to actually applying this penalty should bother him so much.  

These comments by Justice Pfeifer lead me to wonder if, in fact, he has become a death penalty abolitionist on the Ohio Supreme Court like Justices Blackmun and Stevens did on the US Supreme Court.  If so, I wish he would just be candid like Justices Blackmun and Stevens about his new perspective rather than to make this strange and silly call for a "blue-ribbon panel [to be] appointed to look at all those cases" which have left the state right now with 161 Ohio murderers sitting on death row.

I call the Justice Pfeifer's call for a "blue-ribbon" review panel strange and silly because such a panel arguably already exists in the form of Ohio's Parole Board, which reviews every death row defendant's request for clemency and makes recommendations to the Governor about which cases might merit commuting murderer's sentence from death to something else.  To its credit, the Ohio Parole Board conducts open hearings and issues thoughtful recommendations in every capital case in which a death row defendant seeks a reduced sentence.  I am not sure what Justice Pfeifer expects a "blue-ribbon" panel to do that would be different that what the Ohio Parole Board already does (though I do suspect it will cost Ohio taxpayers some extra dollars that we can hardly afford with our state's current budget woes).

Some recent related posts:

• Might Ohio keep pace with Texas in the number of executions in 2010?
• The latest data on the shrinking death row in Ohio
• Ohio succeeds again with one-drug execution protocol
• "Ohio inmate to get 1-drug, slower, execution"
• Reports on Ohio's success with one-drug lethal injection protocol
• A few early questions following Ohio's successful one-drug lethal injection execution
• "A new Texas? Ohio's death penalty examined"
• Ohio — aka the Texas of the north — setting busy execution schedule
• Ohio — aka the northern Texas — executes again