NEW VOICES: Former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro Says Death Penalty Unfixable, ​“Not Worth It Any More”

In a recent commentary in the Columbus Dispatch, former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro (pictured) criticized the state’s death penalty as “a broken system that currently serves only the interest of Ohio prosecutors” and said that keeping “the death penalty is just not worth it any more.” As a state legislator, Petro helped write Ohio’s current death-penalty law and he oversaw eighteen executions as Attorney General from 2003-2007. He says, at the time “[w]e thought maybe it would be a deterrent. Maybe the death penalty would provide cost savings to Ohio. What I know now is that we were wrong.” Petro expressed his agreement with the conclusions in a report, “A Relic of the Past: Ohio’s Dwindling Death Penalty,” released last week by Ohioans to Stop Executions (OTSE), which he says “details a continuing decline in executions and new death sentences in Ohio while highlighting the disparities between counties that prosecute death cases.” The decline is exemplified by the fact that only one new death sentence was imposed in Ohio in 2015 — the fourth consecutive year of decline — and Cuyahoga and Summit counties, which are responsible for more than 25% of Ohio’s death sentences, did not initiate any new death penalty cases last year. The change in death penalty practices in Cuyahoga, which through 2012 had sought death in dozens of cases a year, had nothing to do with crime rates: “there was a new prosecutor,” Petro said. By contrast, Trumbull County had one of the lowest homicide rates in the state but the highest death-sentence-per-homicide rate. “It has become clear to me that what matters most is the personal predilections of a county prosecutor,” Petro said. Petro also was critical of apparent legislative indifference to the flaws in Ohio’s capital punishment system. Despite 13 wrongful convictions and exonerations in Ohio death penalty cases and 56 recommendations for reform made in 2014 by the Ohio Supreme Court’s Joint Task Force on the Administration of Ohio’s Death Penalty, the legislature has seen fit to consider “[o]nly a handful of the recommendations … , and not those which would make the biggest difference.” Petro concludes: “I am convinced that the death penalty is just not worth it any more, and I don’t think it can be fixed. … If we’re going to have the death penalty, then it must not be carried out until the legislature implements the task force’s reforms intended to ensure fairness and accuracy.”

(J. Petro, “Jim Petro commentary: Death penalty is in decline, but problems remain,” Columbus Dispatch, September 10, 2016; 2015 Annual Report, “A Relic of the Past: Ohio’s Dwindling Death Penalty,” Ohioans to Stop Executions, September 7, 2016.) See New Voices and Arbitrariness.