"Writer of death penalty law: It's not working," is the updated AP report by Andrew Welsh-Huggins. It's via the Lancaster Eagle Gazette.
A Supreme Court justice who helped write the state's death penalty law testified Wednesday that the law isn't working and should be scrapped.
Justice Paul Pfeifer said the law was meant for the worst offenders but has been used more haphazardly through time.
"The statute does not work the way we expected," Pfeifer told the House Criminal Justice Committee. "What has enfolded is an application that is hit or miss depending on where you commit the crime and the attitude of the prosecutor in that county."
Pfeifer, a moderate Republican, urged the committee to approve a bill that would scrap the 30-year-old law. He said laws enacted in 1996 and 2005 that provide the option of life in prison without parole have made capital punishment unnecessary, especially now that Ohio executes inmates by injection.
"A comfortable easy death is less punishment than life in prison without parole," Pfeifer said.
The chances of the bill passing are slim, given continued support of capital punishment in Ohio by Republicans and Democrats.
The committee chairman, Rep. Lynn Slaby, a Republican and former prosecutor and appeals court judge, said he couldn't say if there would be another hearing.
"I would still support the death penalty as an option as far as penalty is concerned for the worst of the worst," Slaby said after the three-hour hearing.
"Death-penalty opponents appeal to end the system," by Alan Johnson for the Columbus Dispatch.
Against a backdrop of a 35-year low in U.S. death sentences, Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, family members of murder victims, and Death Row exonerees yesterday urged state lawmakers to abolish capital punishment.
“The death penalty in Ohio has become what I call a death lottery,” Pfeifer told the House Criminal Justice Committee. “The application is hit or miss depending on where you happen to commit the crime and the attitude of the prosecutor in that county.”
He added: “I believe Ohio is no longer well served by our death-penalty statute. It should be repealed.”
And:
Also testifying were two men who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.
Derrick Jamison was freed after 17 years for the 1984 murder of Cincinnati bartender Gary Mitchell. Dale Johnston was exonerated in 1990 after serving seven years for the dismemberment slayings of his daughter, Annette Cooper, and her friend Todd Schultz.
Jamison tearfully recounted the death of his mother and father while he was in prison. “I am not a statistic. I am a person, a child of God who did not deserve the death penalty,” he said.
Johnston, who now lives in Grove City, said he supported the death penalty before his daughter’s murder and his wrongful incarceration. “I am living proof that the death-penalty system is not applied fairly,” he added “The death penalty must be abolished.”
Chris Stout of Dublin, a former state-prison corrections officer, described his 27-year struggle after his mother was murdered and his father permanently disabled in 1984 by two men who showed up at their door asking to use the phone.
After lengthy appeals and reversals in the courts, the case remains undecided. Stout said he is “100 percent disillusioned by this process. ... We’re the ones who’ve become the walking dead.”
"Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer urges lawmakers to repeal death penalty in Ohio," by Joe Guillen for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Pfeifer raised concerns about the death penalty and whether it was applied evenly based on race and geography during testimony before a House committee in 2003. But he did not call for an end to capital punishment at that time.
After his testimony before the House Criminal Justice Committee, Pfeifer said he doesn't expect much support for his position in the GOP-controlled legislature either. Nevertheless, he laid out his case against the punishment, which he referred to as a "death lottery."
Pfeifer was testifying in support of House Bill 160, which would abolish the death penalty in Ohio and resentence death row inmates to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Democratic Reps. Nickie Antonio of Lakewood and Ted Celeste of Columbus are the bill's primary sponsors.
Pfeifer was a state senator and chairman of the Ohio Senate's Judiciary Committee in 1981 when the current death penalty statute became law. Executions, however, did not resume in Ohio until 1999. Since then, the state has executed 46 inmates. Twelve more are scheduled to die by September 2013.
"Ohio is no longer well-served by our death penalty statute and it should be repealed," Pfeifer told the committee. "And the bill you have before you is a good and important place to start."
Pfeifer said the punishment was meant for the "worst of the worst" -- but that is not always the case nowadays. He also said the punishment is not an effective deterrent.
"Ohio justice urges repeal of death penalty," by Jim Provance for the Toledo Blade.
The justice's beliefs on the application of the law that he helped to write as a state senator are well-known, but this is the first time he has testified before lawmakers on the subject. As a sitting justice, he has continued to vote to uphold death sentences and to set execution dates under the law.
Twelve executions have been scheduled, and Justice Pfeifer said two more are coming up, carrying the process into 2014. "I have a duty under the law to follow that law,'' the Republican justice said outside the hearing room. "At the same time, we are admonished under the rules that apply to judges that we have a duty to step forward and advocate for changes we think would lead to an improvement in the law.
"Abolishing the death penalty would be a needed improvement,'' he said. "It will happen. Will it be today, tomorrow, or in this session of the General Assembly? More problematic. But the day will come when Ohio no longer has a death penalty.''
Justice Pfeifer is not the first Supreme Court justice to testify before legislators. The late Chief Justice Thomas Moyer testified on judicial reform and mayors' courts and Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton testified on sentencing reform.
Current Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor has convened a yearlong task force to examine the fairness of how Ohio's death penalty law is applied, but she has stressed the task force will not second-guess whether Ohio should have the death penalty.
"Ohio holds third highest execution rate," by Tom Beyerlein of the Dayton Daily News.
Pfeifer, a Republican serving his fourth term on the Supreme Court, was among a number of opponents testifying at the bill’s first hearing. The bill is unlikely to pass, said committee Chairman Rep. Lynn Slaby, an Akron area Republican and former Summit County prosecutor.
Ohio has become a key state in the ongoing death penalty debate, partly because of high-profile breakdowns in the state’s execution procedures. In July, U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost stayed one inmate’s lethal injection because of the state’s “haphazard” application of its protocols, leading to other postponements and a six-month gap in executions. The state revised its rules, and Frost accepted them, clearing the way for the Nov. 15 execution of Reginald Brooks of Cuyahoga County.
"Testimony asks state to abolish death penalty, it creates 'more victims'," by Marc Kovac in the Wooster Daily-Record.
Twenty-seven years ago, Mary Jane Stout and her husband, Norman, allowed John David Stumpf and another man into their Guernsey County home to use the telephone.
In response, Stumpf shot and killed Mary Jane and attempted to kill her husband with repeated gunshots to the head.
That was in May 1984. Stumpf has been on Death Row since that year while his case works its way through the requisite state and federal appeals before an execution date is set.
On Wednesday, the couple's son asked state lawmakers to abolish Ohio's death penalty, saying the lengthy legal process has brought nothing but pain and constant reminders of the crime rather than closure.
"We need certainty, we need healing," Chris Stout told the House's criminal justice committee. "We need to not be hauled into court again and again for 27 years and ... traumatized over and over."
He added, "I need this system to stop, period. I need the death penalty to be over and I need people to listen to me when I say, do not do this to me or my family. Don't kill John David Stumpf because of me. We've been through enough, and we want it to end. All this system does is create more victims. ..."
Stout was one of more than a dozen people providing testimony in favor of legislation that would end capital punishment in the state.
Kevin Werner of Ohioans to Stop Executions live-tweeted the hearing, and you can read his coverage at the link.
Earlier coverage of the Ohio legislative hearing begins at the link.
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