Supporters rally to try and win clemency for Keith LaMar

For more than 30 years, Keith LaMar has been incarcerated on death row at Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown, most of it in solitary confinement. 

LaMar is scheduled to be executed in January 2030 after being convicted in the 1993 killing of five incarcerated men during what became known as the Lucasville Prison uprising, though he has maintained from day one that he was wrongfully convicted. “I refused to take a plea bargain at 23 years old and stood on my innocence,” he told Matter News in October 2025.

Now, supporters are hoping to win clemency for LaMar, with a public rally planned for Trinity Episcopal Church (125 E. Broad St.) at 3 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 6. The demonstration takes place after supporters plan to deliver a petition requesting a clemency hearing, which Gov. Mike DeWine must approve by the Nov. 9 deadline.

DeWine called for abolishing the state’s death penalty in June, his announcement arriving more than six months after he told reporters in December 2025 that a statement related to capital punishment would be forthcoming. (“We’ll be talking to you in January,” he said at the time.)

“Given what the governor has said about the [death penalty], given his Catholic faith, given his seeming willingness to do something on the issue, as a coalition of organizers we were very optimistic that there was going to be something coming in the final year of his term,” Sean McCann of ACLU of Ohio said in a March interview with Matter News, going on to describe capital punishment as a potential “legacy issue” for DeWine.

Speakers at Friday’s rally in support of LaMar will include death row exonerees Elwood Jones, Lamont Hunter, and Derrick Jamison, with the discussion moderated by Bruce Bryan of The Clemency Collective. LaMar’s legal team will also be on hand to provide an update.

In recent years, LaMar has participated in a series of Freedom First concerts, which see him performing from confinement via cell phone with musicians playing live onstage at venues across the United States, and which Matter News featured ahead of an October 2025 concert at Antioch College, writing:

Toward the end of the performance that yielded the album Live from Death Row, recorded at a concert in Brooklyn in 2023 and released in May of this year, the phone line connecting Keith LaMar from his cell on death row to the musicians onstage abruptly cut out.

“And I’m just a listener, but everybody in the band, without having any plan, all just started playing with this incredible amount of energy, anger, rage, grief, love – all of it,” said Amy Gordiejew, who was in the room at ShapeShifter Lab for the live recording and joined LaMar and musician Albert Marquès for a late October Zoom interview. “And you hear it on the album, too. It’s the most incredible finale. … And it felt, to me, like [the musicians] were saying, ‘If we don’t come together and fight, he’s really going to be gone.’”

…

Before the call to Brooklyn cut off, however, LaMar found himself at least spiritually onstage with an ensemble that included the likes of alto saxophonist Caroline Davis and drummer Zack O’Farrill, reciting poetry he had written as the musicians improvised a jazz score. But as the line went dead and the players locked into an extended musical coda, LaMar again found himself alone in his cell, seated on a mattress he had wedged between the wall and the toilet, where he generally sits for performances because it’s the spot that offers the best phone reception.

“And I couldn’t celebrate with them. I couldn’t join in the euphoria at the end of the concert,” Lamar said. “And so, I picked up my mattress and walked back to my bunk. And I thought that was fitting, you know, because this isn’t a celebration. It’s my life. And I don’t think it’s time for me to celebrate.”