EDITORIALS: Cleveland Plain Dealer Endorses Death Penalty Abolition Bill

The board of Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer published an editorial supporting the passage of Senate Bill 101 that would abolish the death penalty in Ohio. “[T]he time is right,” states the piece, “for the General Assembly to come together to end capital punishment in Ohio. Its inequities are manifest, its barbarism is clear — and its time has passed.”

According to the editorial, Senate Bill 101 currently has bipartisan support among “more than a third of the state Senate. …[and] runs the political spectrum from conservative to liberal and is geographically balanced among Ohio’s regions.”

The editorial points out that the board in the past “has argued against the death-penalty on many grounds—from practicalities and costs to the basic unfairness of a penalty that disproportionately targeted minorities and the poor… We’ve also noted the absolutism of a punishment from which there can be no return, even when later evidence, including DNA evidence, exonerates the person who’s already been put to death.”

The board states, “The death penalty is not just barbaric but has become, practically speaking, all but unworkable in Ohio.” Due to the difficulty in obtaining the necessary drugs for lethal injections, the state has not carried out an execution since 2018, and Governor Mike DeWine has stated that he does not foresee future executions using this method. In the recently published 2022 Capital Crimes Report, Attorney General Dave Yost, a death-penalty proponent, describes the practice as a “broken capital-punishment system.”