Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer recent­ly said all cur­rent death row cas­es should be reviewed to dis­cern which ones war­rant exe­cu­tion and which ones should be com­mut­ed to life in prison with­out parole. ​“There are prob­a­bly few peo­ple in Ohio that are proud of the fact we are exe­cut­ing peo­ple at the same pace as Texas,” Justice Pfeifer said. ​“When the next gov­er­nor is sworn in, I think the state would be well served if a blue-rib­bon pan­el was appoint­ed to look at all those cas­es.” Justice Pfeifer was one of three Republican state sen­a­tors who led the effort to rein­state the death penal­ty in Ohio in 1981 after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the old law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Pfeifer empha­sized that the point of the review was to decide if death is the appro­pri­ate pun­ish­ment for those present­ly on death row, pre­dict­ing that if the major­i­ty of the old cas­es were tried today under cur­rent law and soci­etal stan­dards (includ­ing the avail­abil­i­ty of life with­out parole sen­tences), they would not result in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. He also said, ​“the num­ber of peo­ple we have accu­mu­lat­ed on death row has been rather stag­ger­ing. It’s improb­a­ble that all of those are going to be exe­cut­ed.” Ohio only sen­tenced one per­son to death in 2009, but is cur­rent­ly exe­cut­ing inmates at a rate of one per month.

Ohio has had more exe­cu­tions since 1999 than any state out­side of the South. The state has approx­i­mate­ly 161 peo­ple on death row.

(A. Johnson, ​“Death Row cas­es should be reviewed, jus­tice says,” Columbus Dispatch, May 15, 2010). See New Voices and Arbitrariness.

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