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.