Ending The Death Penalty

Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie J. Antonio and State Senator Steve Huffman testify on Senate Bill 101.

This General Assembly, Senator Steve Huffman and I have once again jointly introduced legislation to end the use of the death penalty in the state of Ohio, replacing it with a sentence of life in prison without parole for capital cases. Senate Bill 101 is historic for several reasons.

Death penalty repeal bills have been introduced in Ohio many times over the last decade. While it might be tempting to think that we still haven’t arrived at the right moment, we speak to our colleagues in the Statehouse every day, and the momentum for ending the death penalty is palpable.

Though there has always been bipartisan support for abolishing the death penalty, this General Assembly’s bill has brought together the strongest bipartisan and bicameral effort yet. The bill is sponsored by over one third of the Senate, including five Republicans and seven Democrats. The House also has a bipartisan companion bill, House Bill 259, which has already received multiple hearings this year.

These benchmarks are unsurprising. For many legislators, abolishing the death penalty has been described as a commonsense policy. Not only is the death penalty at odds with moral, religious and pro-life stances, but capital punishment is an enormous drain on our state’s financial resources. In Ohio, the cost of prosecuting a capital case is ten times more expensive than that of a non-capital case, even before accounting for years of appeals that may follow a conviction.

On March 31, 2023, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost released Ohio’s annual Capital Crimes report for 2022. Findings within the report estimate that it will cost Ohio between $128 million and $384 million to impose the death penalty on the 128 prisoners currently on death row. These numbers are even more egregious when we consider how rarely we actually use the death penalty. Even after setting an execution date, a prisoner is “more likely to die of suicide or natural causes than as a result of execution.” This is due to multiple factors, such as the length of trials and appeals, high demand for lawyers, and the ongoing difficulty in obtaining lethal injection drugs.

Perhaps one of the most compelling arguments to end capital punishment in Ohio came from former Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer. He was one of three Republican state senators who resurrected Ohio’s capital punishment statute in 1981. In 2012, he testified as a proponent in support of the abolition bill. “The death penalty in Ohio has become what I call a death lottery,” Pfeifer told the House Criminal Justice Committee. “The application is hit or miss depending on where you happen to commit the crime and the attitude of the prosecutor in that county.” He added, “I believe Ohio is no longer well served by our death penalty statute. It should be repealed.”

Where you live, your economic status and the county tax dollars available to a prosecutor can also determine whether or not a death sentence will be sought. Ohio has had eleven innocent people sentenced to die and then exonerated, eight of whom were Black men. These exonerees illustrate that the death penalty is fallible, administered with disparities across both economic and racial lines. Meanwhile, the torturous, decades-long process ignores the needs of victims’ family members and repeatedly traumatizes them. We have also heard from leaders in law enforcement who have spoken out about the trauma the death penalty causes prison staff.

The death penalty’s flaws are more than just its practical failings. The death penalty is an affront to our ideals as an evolving society, whether we politically identify as Republican, Democrat, somewhere in between or no affiliation at all.

We work hard to make Ohio a better place to work and live for our constituents. And as we know all too well, Democrats and Republicans can have very different ideas on how we should accomplish that. That’s what makes repealing the death penalty such a remarkable issue: no matter where we are politically, we can agree that repealing it just makes sense.

State Senator Nickie J. Antonio (D-Lakewood) is honored to be serving in the Ohio Senate, representing District 23, and in leadership as the Minority Leader. Antonio, who was elected to the Senate in 2018, previously spent eight years in the Ohio House of Representatives, where she served District 13 and was also a member of leadership. Antonio has served as a Lakewood City Councilmember, Executive Director of an outpatient drug and alcohol treatment program for women, Adjunct Professor, and a teacher for children with special needs.