That's the title of an editorial in today's New York Times.
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio postponed for a month the state’s next execution. The decision is an admission that Ohio’s management of the death penalty is broken and further proof that the machinery of death cannot be operated responsibly anywhere.
The governor made the postponement after a federal district judge in Ohio stayed another execution, when that death-row inmate argued that the state had repeatedly violated its own protocols for administering the death penalty. “It is the policy of the State of Ohio that the State follows its written execution protocol, except when it does not,” Judge Gregory Frost wrote in a legal opinion last month. The judge observed bluntly, “This is nonsense.”
To the judge, “Ohio’s execution policy now embraces a nearly unlimited capacity for deviation from the core or most critical execution procedures.” The state used to insist that its “written protocol” setting out those procedures had “the force of law.” In this case, the state presented the protocol as guidelines that could carelessly be “ignored.”
And:
Ohio’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, said the state will use the additional time before the next execution, scheduled for September, to address these problems. Governor Kasich should instead listen to Ohio’s senior Supreme Court justice, Paul Pfeifer, who helped write the state’s death-penalty law as a legislator and has called on Ohio to abolish what he calls the “death lottery.” It is time for every state with the penalty on the books to outlaw this barbaric punishment.
Earlier coverage of Ohio latest moratorium on lethal injection and Justice Pfeifer's call for repeal begins at the links.
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