In Ohio, executions have stood still for nearly seven years, due in part to what Gov. Mike DeWine says is pharmaceutical companies’ opposition to use of their products in the drug concoction that creates a lethal injection.
One man was sentenced to death in 2024, which was the state’s first death sentence since 2020, according to Attorney General Dave Yost’s recent annual capital case analysis. Under the current system, he could be on Ohio’s Death Row for more than two decades, where inmates now wait about 22 years, on average, for their executions to be carried out—if they are at all.
Yost is pressing for the death penalty to remain available to Ohio prosecutors, including by potentially adding nitrogen gas suffocation to break the lethal injection logjam. Still, he sees eye-to-eye with abolition advocates on the current system not working.
“Even if Ohio’s system is trustworthy in its sentencing decisions, it is not effective in carrying them out,” Yost wrote. “What is lacking is the political will to make capital punishment an effective tool for justice or to eliminate it altogether. It is time to end Ohio’s stalemate.”
Sister Joanne Gross, legal counsel for the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland, is one advocate pushing lawmakers to pursue the latter.
When their fellow Sister Joanne Mascha was assaulted and murdered in 1995 in the woods near their residences, the Catholic sisters fought against a death sentence for her killer, Daniel Pitcher, then 22.
That fell on deaf ears with prosecutors, Gross said. “Only a jury’s mistake on the verdict forms resulted in the young man not facing the death penalty at sentencing,” she said, “which was an answer to our prayers.”
After three decades of reflecting, Gross said Pitcher sent a letter last fall, asking for their forgiveness.
A growing contingent of GOP lawmakers oppose the death penalty in practice, but then-Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) said last year it’s far from most of the caucus’s members.
Right now, there are two proposals that would abolish the death penalty in Ohio—a perennial but historically standalone piece of legislation—and also reaffirm bans on state funds going toward physician-assisted suicide or abortion.
