OUTLIER COUNTIES: Ohio Death-Row Prisoner Challenges Sentence Based on Hamilton County Race Discrimination Study

An African-American man sen­tenced to death in Hamilton County, Ohio in 1999 for the mur­der of a white man is seek­ing to over­turn his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence based on evi­dence from a recent­ly pub­lished study that he was more than five times more like­ly to be sen­tenced to death because of his race and the race of the vic­tim in his case.

On September 3, 2021, cit­ing sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence from a study that found that the races of the defen­dant and the vic­tim have sig­nif­i­cant­ly influ­enced the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty in Hamilton County, Walter Raglin filed a motion for a new tri­al argu­ing that his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence were the improp­er prod­uct of racial discrimination. 

The study, authored by Professors Catherine M. Grosso and Barbara O’Brien at the Michigan State University College of Law and Assistant Federal Public Defender Julie C. Roberts of the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Public Defender for the Southern District of Ohio, and pub­lished last year in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, reviewed the treat­ment of aggra­vat­ed mur­der cas­es in Hamilton County over the quar­ter cen­tu­ry between January 1992 through August 2017. The study found sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence of dis­crim­i­na­tion in charg­ing prac­tices and sen­tenc­ing out­comes based on both the race of the defen­dant and the race of the victim.

The authors of the study exam­ined 599 cas­es in which Hamilton County pros­e­cu­tors charged defen­dants with aggra­vat­ed mur­der, attempt­ing to ascer­tain whether race played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. ​“Hamilton County, Ohio, lies tech­ni­cal­ly just north of the South, but it is close,” the authors wrote. ​“Its his­to­ry reflects the emblem­at­ic seg­re­ga­tion and overt racism asso­ci­at­ed with the South. … It also remains in the top 2% of coun­ties pro­duc­ing a major­i­ty of executions nationally.”

Also con­sid­er­ing Hamilton County’s his­to­ry of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, lynch­ings, and racial seg­re­ga­tion, the researchers con­clud­ed that “[t]he local prac­tice and his­to­ry, bol­stered by the sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis, makes a strong case that race has influ­enced the admin­is­tra­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” in the county.

In a state­ment to the media in 2020, Hamilton County’s long-time Prosecuting Attorney Joe Deters said ​“I set the bar high­er than the law requires, and only the absolute worst cas­es are con­sid­ered for death penal­ty pros­e­cu­tion.” However, Raglin’s motion not­ed, the Columbia Human Rights study found a strong race-of-vic­tim pref­er­ence in coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors’ deci­sions to seek the death penal­ty. The study found that, in cas­es with at least one white vic­tim, the odds that a defen­dant would be cap­i­tal­ly charged were 4.54 times greater than in a sim­i­lar­ly sit­u­at­ed case with no white vic­tims. It fur­ther found that a black defen­dant who was charged with the aggra­vat­ed mur­der of at least one white vic­tim ​“faced odds of receiv­ing a death sen­tence that were 3.79 times those of all oth­er sim­i­lar­ly sit­u­at­ed defen­dants.” When the researchers then exam­ined the sub­set of those cas­es in which pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty, they found that ​“a black defen­dant with at least one white vic­tim faced odds of receiv­ing a death sen­tence that were 5.33 high­er than all other cases.”

In a September 2020 com­men­tary in the Cincinnati Enquirer after the study was pub­lished, Tyra Patterson, Community Outreach Strategy Specialist at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center in Cincinnati, wrote, ​“The death penal­ty lays bare which lives Ohio val­ues most: We are more like­ly to seek death for defen­dants iden­ti­fied as Black, Lantinx or ​‘oth­er,’ and author­i­ties are even more like­ly to seek the death penal­ty when a crime vic­tim is white.” 

“I am all too aware of racial bias in our jus­tice sys­tem,” said Patterson, who spent 23 years in an Ohio prison wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed of a mur­der she did not com­mit. ​“The racial injus­tices that plague our coun­try broad­ly, and the crim­i­nal legal sys­tem specif­i­cal­ly, are shock­ing­ly clear in our appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty,” Patterson wrote. ​“The only way to elim­i­nate racial bias in the death penal­ty is to repeal it. … In Ohio and as a coun­try, if we are seri­ous about improv­ing race rela­tions and build­ing a crim­i­nal legal sys­tem that is ded­i­cat­ed to jus­tice in more than its name, an impor­tant first step is to get rid of the death penalty.”

Ohio’s Death-Penalty Outlier Counties

Hamilton County is not alone in its out­lier use of the death penal­ty in Ohio. A study by researcher Frank Baumgartner at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released in fall 2020 found that Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) and Hamilton County ranked 12^th and 15^th, respec­tive­ly, in death sen­tenc­ing nation­wide. It exam­ined why cer­tain coun­ties imposed more death sen­tences than oth­ers. Each coun­ty falls ​“into a pat­tern of use or avoid­ance based on its own accu­mu­lat­ed his­to­ry,” the study explains. ​“In such a self-rein­forc­ing sys­tem, small ini­tial dif­fer­ences across coun­ties would even­tu­al­ly accu­mu­late into vast dif­fer­ences, with some local­i­ties vir­tu­al­ly nev­er using the death penal­ty and oth­ers using it much more frequently.”

Like Deters, Cuyahoga County pros­e­cu­tors assert that they are using cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment spar­ing­ly. Asked about Baumgartner’s study, a spokesper­son for the pros­e­cut­ing attorney’s office said ​“The Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office rarely seeks cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, but when it does, the jury and the court are in com­plete agree­ment.” However, a DPIC analy­sis of nation­al death-sen­tenc­ing data has found that the five death sen­tences imposed in the coun­ty since 2018 are tied with Riverside County, California for the most in the country. 

Data also sug­gest that coun­ties that most heav­i­ly use cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment also tend to most fre­quent­ly abuse it. DPIC’s February 2021 Special Report: The Innocence Epidemic, found that Cuyahoga ranked sec­ond among U.S. coun­ties, tied with Philadelphia, for the most exon­er­a­tions of death-row pris­on­ers who had been wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed. All six of those wrong­ful con­vic­tions involved police or pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct. A still ongo­ing DPIC review of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct in death penal­ty cas­es nation­wide has iden­ti­fied at least eight Cuyahoga County and four Hamilton County death sen­tences over­turned or death-row pris­on­ers exon­er­at­ed as a result of pros­e­cu­tors with­hold­ing exculpatory evidence.