Ohio Bars Death Penalty for People with Severe Mental Illness

Ohio has banned the death penal­ty for defen­dants who were severe­ly men­tal­ly ill at the time of the offense. On January 9, 2021, Governor Mike DeWine (pic­tured) signed into law House Bill 136, which pro­hibits impos­ing the death penal­ty on or car­ry­ing it out against indi­vid­u­als whose severe men­tal ill­ness at the time of the offense sig­nif­i­cant­ly impaired their judg­ment, capac­i­ty, or abil­i­ty to appre­ci­ate the nature of their conduct. 

The new statute des­ig­nates a series of dis­or­ders as severe men­tal ill­ness­es, includ­ing schiz­o­phre­nia, schizoaf­fec­tive dis­or­der, bipo­lar dis­or­der, or delu­sion­al dis­or­ders. However, the pres­ence of the dis­or­der is not suf­fi­cient in and of itself to exempt an indi­vid­ual from cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion or exe­cu­tion. The law also requires that the men­tal ill­ness ​“sig­nif­i­cant­ly impaired the person’s capac­i­ty to exer­cise ratio­nal judg­ment in rela­tion to [his or her] con­duct” with respect to either ​“con­form­ing the per­son­’s con­duct to the require­ments of law” or in ​“appre­ci­at­ing the nature, con­se­quences, or wrong­ful­ness of [his or her] conduct.” 

The law affords cap­i­tal defen­dants an oppor­tu­ni­ty for pre­tri­al eval­u­a­tion of their men­tal con­di­tion and a pre­tri­al hear­ing at which the court deter­mines their eli­gi­bil­i­ty for the death penal­ty. Defendants who prove ​“by a pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence” that they were severe­ly men­tal­ly ill at the time of the crime, can­not be sen­tenced to death but, if con­vict­ed, face an auto­mat­ic sen­tence of life with­out parole. Current death-row pris­on­ers have one year in which to peti­tion the court to over­turn their death sen­tences because of severe mental illness.

The bill received over­whelm­ing bipar­ti­san sup­port in both leg­isla­tive cham­bers, despite vocal oppo­si­tion by state pros­e­cu­tors. It passed the state house by a vote of 76 to 18 in June 2019, fol­lowed by a 27 to 3 vote on a slight­ly amend­ed ver­sion in the Senate in December 2020. The House then con­curred in the Senate amend­ments. Democratic State Rep. Brett Hillyer, the lead spon­sor of the leg­is­la­tion, pat­terned the bill on rec­om­men­da­tions made by the Ohio Supreme Court’s Death Penalty Task Force in 2014. Sen. John Eklund, a Republican sup­port­er of the mea­sure, said, ​“We’re try­ing to make the death penal­ty in Ohio admin­is­tered in the most fair and judicious manner.”

The bill was backed by the Ohio Alliance for the Mental Illness Exemption (OAMIE), a coali­tion of indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions from the men­tal health and crim­i­nal jus­tice reform com­mu­ni­ties. In a let­ter to the gov­er­nor urg­ing him to sign the bill, the alliance said the pro­pos­al would ​“ensure that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is admin­is­tered more fair­ly by pro­tect­ing indi­vid­u­als with cer­tain seri­ous men­tal ill­ness­es from the ulti­mate penal­ty of death. Passing this bill,” they wrote, ​“is an impor­tant step for­ward in rec­og­niz­ing men­tal ill­ness and break­ing through years of stigma.”

Measures to exempt peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness from exe­cu­tion have received grow­ing sup­port across the coun­try. In 2016, the American Bar Association released a white paper pro­vid­ing pol­i­cy analy­sis in sup­port of a death-penal­ty exemp­tion for peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness. Proposals sim­i­lar to Ohio’s law have gained the sup­port of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Mental Health America (MHA), and state-lev­el coali­tions of men­tal health advo­cates. Former Republican Ohio Governor Bob Taft joined Joseph E. Kernan, a for­mer Democratic Governor of Indiana, in a 2017 op-ed call­ing the exe­cu­tion of men­tal­ly ill defen­dants ​“an inhu­mane prac­tice that fails to respect com­mon stan­dards of decen­cy and com­port with rec­om­men­da­tions of mental-health experts.” 

At least six oth­er death-penal­ty states have con­sid­ered severe men­tal ill­ness exemp­tions in recent years, but Ohio is the first state to enact one. The Virginia Senate passed a sim­i­lar bill ear­li­er in 2020, but it stalled in the House.