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Letter to the editor

Ohio courts face scrutiny over death penalty fairness

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Lawmakers writing a new capital punishment law two decades ago wanted a fair system for prosecuting the worst of the worst: killers whose crimes were so terrible there would be no question they deserved to die.

That didn't happen.

Ohio's death penalty has been inconsistently applied since it was enacted in 1981, according to a first-ever analysis by the Associated Press. Race, the extensive use of plea bargains and even where a crime has been committed all play a role in who is sentenced to death.

In its research, the AP analyzed 1,936 indictments reported to the Ohio Supreme Court from October 1981 through 2002.

Among the findings:

Offenders facing a death penalty charge for killing a white person were two times more likely to go to death row than if the victim was black. Death sentences were handed down in 18 percent of cases where victims were white, compared with 8.5 percent of cases where victims were black.

Nearly half of the 1,936 capital punishment cases ended with a plea bargain. That includes 131 cases in which the crime involved two or more victims.

State Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer, who cosponsored the death penalty law in 1981 as a member of Ohio's Legislature, said the findings reaffirm concerns that race would come into play.

"That has to be very disconcerting and alarming to all of us," he said.

Sandra Craig's son, Jeffrey, and a friend were beaten to death in the summer of 1995 over drugs. Both men were black, and the men who killed them were black and white. Craig is incensed prosecutors offered her son's killers a plea bargain that resulted in sentences of 20 years to life in prison.

"It was just another black person dead. They could just do this and move on to the next thing," said Craig, from Columbus.

The race of Jeffrey Craig and his friend, Keith Johnson, played no role, said Franklin County assistant prosecutor Doug Stead.

There always has been a race element to the death penalty in Ohio, said David Doughten, a Cleveland defense lawyer who has handled dozens of capital cases.

"I'm not saying judges or prosecutors or anybody is overtly racist - I don't think they are - but you see it happen," Doughten said. "You see it in deals. You see it in negotiations. You see it in how things are reviewed."

Ohio and other states rewrote their death penalty laws after a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling essentially declared laws in 40 states unconstitutional. Other studies of state laws enacted since 1972 have found the same type of discrepancies identified by the Associated Press review, including a higher percentage of death sentences for those who kill whites.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 1987 that Georgia's death penalty was constitutional despite figures indicating that killers of whites are far more likely to be sentenced to death. Justice Lewis F. Powell said numerous variables inevitably influence the outcome of a case.

In Ohio, a prosecutor's willingness to deal can influence the outcome.

In Hamilton County, which had the highest number of death sentences at 55, prosecutor Joe Deters said he did not accept plea bargains once he decided to seek the death penalty.

"There's a lot of lazy lawyers out there. You're not here to take pleas. You're here to try cases," said Deters, a former state treasurer re-elected to the prosecutor's job last year.

Issues surrounding the fairness of Ohio's system arose in 2002, when Judge Jeffrey Simmons ruled that paying for the death penalty defense of a man accused of murdering a Kenyon College student would deplete the $2.7-million general fund of the small southern Ohio county. The judge said the county's financial worries about his defense could create an unacceptable risk to Gregory McKnight's right to due process.

Prosecutors and the state objected. Simmons reversed his decision, and the state helped prosecute McKnight, who was sentenced to death.

State Public Defender David Bodiker says the variation in capital cases is unacceptable.

"To say, "Well, we get close but maybe it isn't perfect,' suggests that we should not risk taking lives on that kind of standard," Bodiker said.

[Last modified May 8, 2005, 00:46:16]