COLUMBUS — A former director of Ohio’s prison system who personally oversaw 15 executions told state senators on Wednesday that he now opposes the death penalty.

“I do not believe that we are executing the worst of the worst...,” said Gary Mohr, who directed the state Department of Rehabilitation and Correction from 2011 to 2018 under then-Gov. John Kasich.

“I do not believe the death penalty is a deterrent,” Mr. Mohr said. “Quite frankly, if I believed the death penalty was a deterrent and would keep our staff safe, I would not be testifying today.”

“But what we realized is that the 15 executions that I oversaw and administered [took place] 30 years or more from the time of the event, the time of the crime. ...,” he said. “There’s no deterrence when that period of time takes place.”

Jim Provance

Attorney general urges nitrogen gas as option for Ohio executions

The Senate Judiciary Committee is considering Senate Bill 101, the latest attempt to abolish the death penalty in Ohio. While versions of the bill have been introduced for years in the House or Senate without reaching either chamber’s floor, the issue has slowly gathered more bipartisan support.

The Senate bill is sponsored by state Sen. Nickie Antonio (D., Lakewood) and Sen. Stephen Huffman (R., Tipp City), a physician. It would replace existing death sentences with life in prison without parole. A similar bill has been introduced in the House.

Ohio last executed an inmate in July, 2018, as lethal injection drug manufacturers have denied sales for execution purposes, threatening to withhold them for other therapeutic uses if used in executions.

Gov. Mike DeWine took office in 2019. He has cited the drug availability issue and has also questioned the value of executions as a deterrence. He has challenged state lawmakers to either do away with capital punishment or adopt a different method, and the Republican-controlled General Assembly has done neither.

Mr. Mohr is not the first person to hold his former position and later opposed Ohio's capital punishment law.

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He stood a few feet from the lethal injection gurney when he would give the order to proceed with an execution. He was there when Ohio reverted to a single-drug protocol and said that he witnessed a “humane” execution. But the manufacturer again made that one unavailable.

As state corrections director, he was sued for wrongful death because of an execution that involved a three-drug protocol that he agreed was “different,” although he disagreed that the inmate suffered.

In addition to meeting with the condemned, he would meet with the victims’ family members who came to witness executions.

Speaking for the Ohio Council of Churches, Amariah McIntosh, of Bowling Green, urged lawmakers to pass the bill this time.

“As someone who has experienced the pain as a family member of someone whose life was taken senselessly, I still believe there are more humane ways to affect justice in these cases...,” she said. “The death penalty is final, so that if it is discovered that an error has been made in its application, there is no way to correct the error.”

Testimony on Wednesday was limited to proponents of the law, among them a judge, defense attorneys, religious organizations, and even some family members of murder victims.

The Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association opposes the bill, saying polling suggests a majority of Ohioans support it, particularly in cases involving multiple victims, young child victims, and terrorism.

“Six or seven other states have proceeded with executions with lethal injection,” executive director Louis Tobin said. “Other states are finding the drugs. I think there is a lack of political will in this administration to proceed with the death penalty.

“That said, there are things the legislature could explore that we could support,” he said. “We could reinstitute confidentiality for drug-makers to provide lethal injection drugs. ... I think we should be talking about alternative methods.”

He noted that other states have recently switched to nitrogen hypoxia and that Alabama has set an execution date using that method.

First Published November 16, 2023, 4:37 a.m.

COLUMBUS — Less than a week after Alabama became the first state to execute an inmate using nitrogen hypoxia, Ohio’s top law enforcement official and Republican lawmakers are looking at putting the death penalty back on track here.

Condemned inmates would be given a choice between dying via lethal injection, currently the sole sanctioned method of execution in Ohio, or nitrogen gas with the latter becoming the default option when lethal injection drugs are unavailable under a bill introduced by Reps. Brian Stewart (R., Ashville) and Phil Plummer (R., Dayton).

“This is the law of the land,” Attorney General Dave Yost said. “If we wish to break the promises we made to the families of all these victims over all these years, if we wish to not keep faith with the jurors we asked to take this heavy weight on to make a judgment, then we owe it to our society and all those who are involved to own our decision to change our minds.”

The 12-page bill is supported by the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association.

Mr. Stewart said the introduction sets the stage for debate over the summer. Even if lawmakers act swiftly and Gov. Mike DeWine were to sign such a bill into law, executions are unlikely to resume right away in Ohio. Any change in execution protocol — even just a change in drugs used in lethal injection — trigger court challenges.

There has not been an execution in Ohio since 2018, before Mr. DeWine took office. The governor has routinely delayed scheduled executions for years down the road and has not expressed a sense of urgency in interrupting that status quo.

Like other states, Ohio has struggled to obtain the lethal injection drugs it would prefer to use because their manufacturers refuse to make them available for executions. This is what caused Alabama to switch to a gas mask that fed pure nitrogen gas to convicted murderer Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, leading to his death by oxygen deprivation.

Mr. DeWine recently told The Blade that he expects to complete his second term in 2027 without an execution on his watch. He said it was up to lawmakers to decide which direction to go — changing the method of execution or doing away with the death penalty altogether. But he had no intention of pointing fellow Republicans who control the General Assembly in either direction.

As attorney general prior to becoming governor, Mr. DeWine succeeded in putting multiple executions back on schedule after judges had halted them. That, he told The Blade, was his job at the time.

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Support for abolishing the death penalty in Ohio has slowly grown over the years across both sides of the aisle.

“Support for existing law as it relates to capital punishment is very strong in our [House Republican] caucus,” Mr. Stewart said. “Every year in the General Assembly we have an abolition bill that gets introduced. We have a small handful in the caucus who sign on to cosponsor those bills...Those bills never go anywhere, and then we're right back where we have been.”

Alabama became the first state to complete an execution using nitrogen on Thursday. Mississippi and Oklahoma have also adopted nitrogen hypoxia, but neither state has used it.

Ohio’s bill also seeks to expand protections for those participating in the execution process, including those who may compound drugs for the state, by prohibiting the disclosure of identifying information about such people.

“It is unfortunate that anyone would rush to the nearest camera to plead for the introduction of experimental methods to resume the barbaric practice,” said Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D., Lakewood), a sponsor of the bipartisan Senate bill to abolish the death penalty.

“The state of Alabama has resurrected its death penalty procedures using nitrogen gas, a method so unconscionable that veterinarians reject its use to euthanize animals,” she said. “Ohio should show moral leadership and reject the death penalty outright rather than fall in line with this misguided policy.”

Later, when talking with questioned by reporters, Mr. DeWine declined to comment on suggestions his administration could have done more to obtain execution drugs as some other states had succeeded in doing. He also maintained his stance of not choosing between the abolition and alternative method bills.

He also said he doesn't know how complicated it might be to switch methods.

“First of all we've only had one example of this execution,” he said.

The state carried out its first execution of the modern era in 1999 after the U.S. Supreme Court forced it and other states to rewrite their laws. Since then, Ohio put 56 people to death through 2018, all using some variation of lethal injection.

At one point, inmates has a choice between the electric chair and the lethal injection gurney. But when one inmate in 2001 opted for electrocution in order to make his death as difficult for spectators as possible, lawmakers acted swiftly to make lethal injection the sole sanctioned method of execution.

There are currently 117 men and one woman on Ohio’s death row, including eight inmates from Lucas County and one from Wood.

First Published January 31, 2024, 2:21 a.m.

United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain arrived in Toledo Tuesday afternoon for a closed-door meeting with members of Local 12, which represents the area’s Stellantis workers and those who work for Stellantis’ suppliers.

Mr. Fain would not speak with media, which were also excluded from the premises during the meeting.

The mood in and outside the union hall before Mr. Fain arrived was generally amicable, though an undercurrent of anger ran through some of the conversations.

“Shawn Fain. I forget. Is he a communist or a socialist?” an older man wearing a union jacket exclaimed as he walked into the building.

Before Mr. Fain’s arrival, about a hundred laid-off workers gathered in one of the union hall’s large meeting rooms to get information about unemployment benefits. The permanently laid-off workers were advised to respond quickly to all requests for information from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. The union also promised to get written how-to materials to its laid-off members next week to assist them with the unemployment application process.

Mike Sawaya, UAW Local 12's Jeep chairman, said that he wondered whether the recent layoffs at the Jeep plant were part of a management strategy to discourage members from voting to authorize a strike.

Laid-off workers are eligible to receive 50 percent of their average weekly wage in unemployment compensation, subject to certain maximum amounts. Striking workers, however, are not eligible for unemployment compensation and receive payments instead from the union’s strike fund. Those payments are much smaller than unemployment compensation payments.

Mr. Fain’s visit to Toledo comes at a particularly fraught time for both the union and Stellantis.

UAW locals in Denver, Los Angeles, Kokomo, Ind., and Belvidere, Ill., have held strike votes recently. While a majority of the members who voted in all four locals favored calling a strike, the vote in Kokomo didn’t reach the two-thirds supermajority required by the union’s constitution.

The Toledo-area auto industry has seen the loss of 1,519 jobs in the last two weeks, with 1,139 workers permanently laid off at Jeep, 210 at Mobis, and 170 at KUKA. Since then, laid-off Toledo-area Stellantis and Stellantis-supplier workers have struggled with the slow-moving unemployment claims process.

While Stellantis blames “market conditions” for the slowdown in sales that allowed inventory of unsold products to stack up on dealer lots, Kevin Gotinsky, the director of the UAW’s Stellantis department, argues that “what they call ‘market conditions’ is just mismanagement at a single company. Ford and GM are doing just fine while Stellantis claims the sky is falling.”

The union contends that Stellantis has been mismanaged, particularly with respect to its U.S. brands: Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram. While Stellantis’ North American sales are sinking, revenues at Stellantis as a whole have increased from $158.29 billion in 2020 to $201 billion in 2023. However, in the first six months of 2024, the company reported revenue of $90.1 billion, a 3.39 percent decrease compared to the same period last year.

“We are going to have to fight on multiple fronts to save this company from itself,” Mr. Gotinsky said in a memorandum to union members.

First Published November 20, 2024, 5:48 a.m.