Republican governor Mike DeWine, the who co-wrote the bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty more than 45 years ago, has called for the state to abolish capital punishment, saying it did not improve public safety and could no longer be morally justified.
“I no longer believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder,” DeWine said on Tuesday. “The moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.”
Tuesday’s announcement represents a change of heart for the 79-year-old governor. After Ohio’s reinstated death penalty law was stuck down in 1978, DeWine, then a newly minted state senator, was instrumental in crafting the 1981 law that survived court challenges and remains in effect. But DeWine has softened his stance in recent years, and repeatedly delayed executions throughout his nearly eight-year tenure as Ohio’s governor.
His call for abolition is consistent with the moderate approach to capital punishment that has defined his time as governor, and it puts him at odds with national Republican leaders like Donald Trump, who has sought to expand the death penalty in his second term.
DeWine noted that in the state’s last 10 executions, the average time elapsed between sentencing and execution date was 21 years.
“A lot of people think the response is to shorten the time between sentence and execution, but then we see how many times we get it wrong,” warned Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonpartisan research organization.
“When we take the time to thoughtfully review these cases, as we should, we find errors. And that takes time, and a lot of money.”
DeWine urged state lawmakers to take action on abolishing the death penalty, noting if they refuse, voters could make the call. Ohio is among the states that allows citizens to initiate ballot measures to amend their constitution.
There are currently bipartisan bills to repeal the death penalty in both chambers of the Ohio legislature, though legislative leaders in the Republican-controlled chambers have refused to call the bills to a vote.
A representative for DeWine’s office on Tuesday declined to comment on whether the governor, who is term-limited and will leave office in January, would commute the death sentences of the 114 prisoners on Ohio’s death row.
Among those who track developments in Ohio’s death penalty, DeWine’s call for abolition was not entirely a surprise: DeWine has kept a de facto moratorium on executions, and for months hinted he would have more to say on the death penalty when he was ready.
“He understands the process probably better than any other governor in Ohio’s history,” said Kevin Werner, executive director of Ohioans to Stop Executions, a nonprofit that supports abolition. “He’s seen this from every conceivable vantage point – he’s been very deliberate, very measured.”
DeWine’s career has included time as a prosecutor in south-west Ohio, an Ohio state senator, a US congressman, a US senator, lieutenant governor of Ohio, Ohio attorney general, and governor.
Werner said DeWine’s strong reputation among Ohio Republicans could carry real weight when it comes to nudging legislators.
“Every year that we’ve had a repeal bill, we’ve gotten more and more conservatives who have come out and said, ‘I agree, the system doesn’t work,’” Werner said.
In his remarks, DeWine also highlighted stories from murder victims’ families who felt re-victimized by the grueling process of death penalty prosecutions and sentences and from corrections staffer who bear the burden of carrying out executions – especially after a string of high-profile botches, like the lethal injection of Dennis McGuire in 2014 that used an untested drug cocktail.
Ohio’s last was in 2018, the year DeWine was elected governor.
