Ohio Governor Halts ​“Cruel and Unusual” Lethal-Injection Executions

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (pictured) has halted all executions in the state until its Department of Rehabilitation and Correction is able to develop a new execution protocol that gains approval from the courts. Responding to the findings of a federal court that likened Ohio’s three-drug lethal-injection protocol to a combination of waterboarding and chemical fire, DeWine said “Ohio is not going to execute someone under my watch when a federal judge has found it to be cruel and unusual punishment.” DeWine announced his decision at an Associated Press forum in Columbus on February 19. The Republican governor did not set a date on which he expected executions to resume, saying “[a]s long as the status quo remains, where we don’t have a protocol that has been found to be OK, we certainly cannot have any executions in Ohio.”

On January 14, federal magistrate Judge Michael Merz issued an opinion saying that executions under Ohio’s current drug protocol “will almost certainly subject [prisoners] to severe pain and needless suffering.” Mertz noted that 24 of 28 available autopsies from executions involving the sedative midazolam — the first drug in Ohio’s protocol — showed evidence of pulmonary edema, a build-up of fluid in the lungs that was “painful, both physically and emotionally, inducing a sense of drowning and the attendant panic and terror, much as would occur with the torture tactic known as waterboarding.” Mertz found that midazolam lacked the pharmacological properties necessary to keep the prisoner unconscious during the administration of the paralytic second drug, rocuronium bromide, and the heart-stopping third drug, potassium chloride. As a result, he said, the prisoner would experience the sensation of “fire … being poured” through his veins when those drugs were administered. The court’s ruling led DeWine to issue a six-month reprieve to death-row prisoner Warren Keith Henness, who had been scheduled to be executed February 13.

DeWine sponsored Ohio’s capital punishment law as a state senator in 1981 and later represented the state in death-penalty cases as its Attorney General. The governor, who is Catholic and identifies himself as pro-life, has not said how those beliefs affect his stance on the death penalty. When reporters at the forum asked about his personal views on capital punishment, DeWine equivocated. “It is the law of the state of Ohio,” he said. “And I’ll let it go [not comment further] at this point. We are seeing clearly some challenges that you have all reported on in regard to carrying out the death penalty.” Ohio has six more executions scheduled in 2019 and 23 scheduled through 2023.

Kevin Werner of Ohioans to Stop Executions praised the governor’s decision, but cautioned that broad problems identified in a 2014 Task Force Report on the state’s death penalty still need to be addressed. The people set to be executed, he said, are among the most vulnerable in the criminal legal system: “They are people who are poor, who killed white victims, and who have some underlying substance abuse or abuse as children or have a mental illness — I mean, that’s who we’re talking about here.”