Ohio's top judge on Thursday announced a committee will review the state's death penalty law and determine if changes should be made, but with an important caveat: It won't debate whether Ohio should have capital punishment.
The review, 30 years after Ohio enacted its most recent death penalty law, will make sure the current system is administered fairly, efficiently and in the most "judicious manner possible," said Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor.
"Is the system we have the best we can do?" said O'Connor, a Republican and a former prosecutor. "Convening persons with broad experience on this subject will produce a fair, impartial, and balanced analysis."
The 20-member committee, convened by the Supreme Court and the Ohio State Bar Association, will consist of judges, prosecuting attorneys, criminal defense lawyers, lawmakers and academic experts.
After years of Democrats calling for such a review, as well as a moderate Republican colleague of O'Connor on the Supreme Court, it took the former prosecutor with a tough criminal justice reputation to put such a process in place.
House Democratic lawmakers tried four times in previous legislative sessions to create such a review, with success only once when conservative Republicans who oppose abortion and capital punishment joined them.
That provision lasted exactly one day, until the GOP-controlled Senate killed the idea.
Justice Paul Pfeifer, a Republican from Bucyrus, has called for such a review for years. In January, he made even stronger comments, saying the state should abolish capital punishment.
Pfeifer, who helped write the 1981 law as a state senator, has said for years he believes prosecutors were seeking the death penalty in cases such as domestic violence slayings that the law wasn't meant for. A message was left seeking comment Thursday.
O'Connor made it clear Thursday in the annual speech given by chief justices that the review won't debate the law itself.
Instead, it will review Ohio's current laws, practices elsewhere, data and costs. It will also review a 2007 report released by the American Bar Association that called for a moratorium while problems the report said it had identified were examined.
That report didn't go far because of the perception that several of the researchers were biased against the death penalty.
Phyllis Crocker, who chaired the ABA report on the Ohio law, said Thursday she was pleased with O'Connor's announcement.
"A thorough examination of our state's death penalty system was one of the goals of the 2007 ABA Death Penalty Report," Crocker, interim dean of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State, said in an email.
A 2005 review of 20 years of capital punishment data by The Associated Press concluded that death sentences varied widely depending on where in the state charges were brought. The AP review also found people convicted of killing a white victim were twice as likely to receive a death sentence as those whose victim was black.
As it stands, the state is the midst of an unofficial death penalty moratorium while a federal judge decides whether the policies Ohio follows for carrying out executions are constitutional. 3 executions have already been postponed and on Thursday defense attorneys filed a motion to delay an execution scheduled for next month.
However, that moratorium is not official and is not expected to last indefinitely.
Source: Associated Press, September 9, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment