That's the title of an editorial in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer. It concerns Kevin Keith's clemency hearing last week, and the call for a systemic review of all of Ohio's death sentences. LINK
But at the very least, the evidence presented last week ought to give the parole board -- and ultimately Gov. Ted Strickland, who has final say on its recommendations and on whether to proceed with Keith's execution -- plenty of reasons to call a timeout. Before Ohio or any other state puts someone to death, it had better be sure that person is guilty as charged.
This page has long opposed capital punishment. It has also called for a moratorium on executions while Ohio conducts a top-to-bottom review of each case on death row and how capital cases are conducted in the state. The troubling questions around Keith's case -- and his fate-- only reinforce those positions.
Legal analyst Andrew Cohen posts, "On Death Row in Ohio: Is Kevin Keith an Innocent Man?," at Politics Daily. It's a must-read.
When last we left the sorry state of capital punishment in Ohio, hapless prison officials were attempting to execute the same man twice after failing to find a usable vein the first time they put him onto the gurney. They did not succeed -- the death row inmate, Romell Broom, is still alive -- but the embarrassing episode did cause the Buckeye State finally to reform its dubious lethal-injection protocols. That's the good news. The bad news is that a new case, the case of Kevin Keith, shows once again how far Ohio is from affording capital suspects even the most basic constitutional rights.
And:
A generation ago, following the renewal of capital punishment in America in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Gregg v. Georgia, it was left to the courts to resolve the types of thorny questions posed by the Keith case. Experts at evaluating evidence, trial and appellate judges were encouraged, or at least not thoroughly discouraged, to dig down deep into disputes like this, to question law enforcement work more rigorously, and to not simply cast off onto the executive branch (via clemency) the responsibility of acting as a safety net to ensure that no innocent man or woman is ever executed. The courts took care of these cases and governors, generally, did not.
In the intervening decades, however, all that changed. Conservative jurists, led by the late Chief Justices Warren Burger and William Rehnquist, have dramatically limited the arrest, trial, and post-conviction rights of men like Keith. The lower courts and the state courts and the Congress and state legislators around the country have done likewise. The result is the Keith case. Despite obvious questions about the man's conviction, and despite atrocious procedural rules that often block meaningful appellate review, the very prosecutors who sanctioned a sloppy trial and then defended its result now evidently get to say to the governor, as they did at Keith's clemency board hearing last week: "Furthermore, both the state and federal courts have repeatedly upheld his conviction, even though Keith made the exact same claims he is making to this board."
For Keith, it's not surprising that the whole thing smacks of a three-card monte game. The police and prosecutors play fast and loose. The courts now are bound not to ask too many questions following a jury's verdict. And the governor's mansion is interested in politics more than in the Constitution. It's hard to say today whether Keith deserves a better fate. But the rest of the citizens of Ohio surely do.
Earlier coverage begins with this post. Earlier coverage of the Ohio Chief Justice's call for a sweeping review of the state's death sentences is here.
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