The death penalty in Ohio stands at a critical juncture

When Republican Gov. Mike DeWine delivered his State of the State address on Tuesday, he avoided mention of Ohio’s broken death penalty system – this despite having teased an announcement related to capital punishment for more than a year.

“I’m going to spend a little time at Christmas writing my statement,” DeWine told reporters in early December. “We’ll be talking to you in January.” (No such conversation took place, and earlier this week, in response to an inquiry from Matter News, a spokesman for the governor said DeWine had “no new public statements beyond his previous comments.”)

In the past, DeWine has hinted that his support for capital punishment has waned, and Ohio has yet to execute a prisoner under his watch, with the governor citing challenges in acquiring the needed execution drugs as a primary reason. By comparison, 15 people were executed under previous governor John Kasich. 

The lack of executions within the state, along with DeWine’s repeated teasing of a larger statement, had stoked hopes among those working to abolish the death penalty in Ohio that the governor might take more direct action up to and including commuting the sentences faced by the 113 people sitting on death row to life without parole. But as the clock begins to wind down on his term, some of this initial enthusiasm has admittedly waned.

“It’s a little bit like ‘Groundhog Day,’ where it feels like he’s done this before, like, ‘Oh, I will say something about this later,’” said Bekky Baker of the Cincinnati-based advocacy group Ignite Peace. “And now we’re getting down to crunch time, where he’s pushed it down to his last year in office.”

Both Baker and Sean McCann of ACLU of Ohio said they view direct action by the governor as the best means currently available to address capital punishment in the state, with legislation having stalled out under Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, who said he would oppose any effort to eliminate the death penalty.

“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,” said McCann, who described capital punishment as a potential “legacy issue” for DeWine. “There’s certainly not renewed optimism in the legislature … knowing there are obstacles, like the speaker, who is not interested in seeing a repeal bill come to the floor.”

McCann said opposition to capital punishment can be rooted in a wealth of factors that range from religious beliefs – the Catholic Church, for one, teaches that the death penalty is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and has pushed for its abolition worldwide – to the longstanding inequities and flaws present within the U.S. criminal justice system at large.

“There are so many reasons [the ACLU of Ohio] opposes the death penalty, beginning with, obviously, the risk of executing an innocent person,” said McCann, who cited as one example the case of Elwood Jones, who spent 27 years on Ohio’s death row for a murder he did not commit before charges were dismissed in December. “And while there’s an inherent racial bias within our criminal justice system, in general, it’s more pronounced on death row.”

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, roughly 55 percent of the people on Ohio’s death row are African Americans, who make up only about 13.6 percent of the population in the state, according to Census data.

One of these people currently on death row is the Cleveland-born poet, author, and musician Keith LaMar, who has spent more than 30 years incarcerated, almost all of it in solitary confinement. LaMar is scheduled to be executed in January 2027 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 said in an October 2025 interview with Matter News.

In recent years, LaMar has worked alongside a group of jazz musicians to stage a series of Freedom First concerts designed to advocate not just for his own release but for the total abolition of the death penalty. “There was a philosopher who said, ‘A revolutionary is a drowning man,’ and that’s what it feels like,” LaMar said by phone from his cell in Youngstown’s Ohio State Penitentiary. “I’m standing on the brink of my existence, and everything I do is life or death.”

In its history, Ohio has exonerated 12 people incarcerated on death row, including Elwood Jones, whose case underscores the risks of wrongful conviction within the state’s death penalty system, wrote the advocacy group Ohioans to Stop Executions.

And these numbers don’t include the still-unfolding case of Tony Apanovitch. Convicted of rape in murder in 1984, Apanovitch was freed from death row in 2015 based on DNA evidence, only to see the Ohio Supreme Court reinstate his death sentence on a technicality in 2018. (The court said it reincarcerated Apanovitch because he didn’t request the DNA testing that he said exonerate him.)

Ignite Peace’s Baker referenced the Apanovitch case in discussing the evolution of Ohio State Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Loveland, a more recent convert to death penalty abolition who has co-sponsored bipartisan legislation that would close loopholes protecting Ohioans from being falsely imprisoned in spite of evidence that can prove their innocence, as well as a bill that would repeal the death penalty altogether. “When I started this work four and a half years ago, that bipartisan support was really exciting,” Baker said. “We’ve had a number of people you wouldn’t expect come forward and say, ‘This is not working. This is not right.’”

And yet, there also exists among advocates an awareness that this moment might stand as the best opportunity for meaningful immediate action to be taken against the death penalty in Ohio, given both DeWine’s apparent aversion to capital punishment and the numerous unknowns connected to the race to be his successor, with frontrunners Vivek Ramaswamy and Amy Acton currently polling at a statistical dead heat.

“I think it’s very fair to say we might have more clarity now than we will in 2027,” McCann said.

This future is further clouded by the actions of the federal government under President Donald Trump, who in January 2025 issued an executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” which calls for the Attorney General to seek the death penalty for every federal crime when a law enforcement officer is murdered, or when the person alleged to have committed a capital offense is an immigrant without lawful status. (The order also encourages states to do the same.) And while DeWine has paused executions in Ohio, upticks in Florida, Texas, South Carolina, and Alabama have combined to drive executions to a 15-year high in the United States.

“It always harkens back to this tough on crime narrative, and the death penalty is the ultimate punishment,” said Baker, who continues to be motivated by the unflagging energies of those working within and adjacent to Ignite Peace to see the death penalty abolished. “There’s just a level of perseverance where no matter what, we’re going to keep going. … We always say that people are more than the worst thing they’ve ever done. … And it’s important to remember who we throw away and the things we push out of our eyesight.”