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Fewest death penalty sentences issued in decades

Staff Illustration U.S. death penalty statistics

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Staff Illustration All U.S. executions by state, 2009

ENLARGE PHOTO

Chris Griffith Inside the Death House at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

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By Tom Beyerlein, Staff Writer Updated 6:32 AM Friday, December 18, 2009

U.S. courts in 2009 have issued the fewest death sentences in any year since the resumption of executions in the United States in 1976, according to a report released today, Dec. 18, by the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Ohio has added only one new convict to death row, a new low except for 1979-82, when state legislators were rewriting an old death penalty law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The one new death sentence in Ohio this year compares with 25 in 1977, 21 in 1985 and 17 each in 1983, 1995 and 1996, according to statistics compiled by the center. Nationwide, there were 106 new death sentences in 2009 as of Wednesday, down from 284 in 1999.

Ohio carried out five executions this year, more than any state except Texas, with 24, and Alabama, with six. Ohio would have trailed only Texas had not the executions of Cleveland murderer Romell Broom and two others been postponed after the aborted attempt to give Broom a lethal injection on Sept. 14.

The Ohio Supreme Court has set six execution dates so far for 2010, one per month from January to June. “(Ohio) won’t surpass Texas, but (it) will be one of the more prominent states for executions” in the coming year, said the center’s executive director, Richard Dieter.

Eleven of the 35 states that have a death penalty carried out 52 executions this year. That’s up from 2008, partly due to a moratorium from September 2007 to May 2008 while the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the lethal injection method.

“With the declining number of death sentences, the number of executions will eventually come down, but there’s still a backlog” of cases running out of appeals, Dieter said.

New sentences have declined, he said, because of DNA exonerations of capital murder convicts and the option in some states, including Ohio, of sentencing murderers to life in prison without parole.

“I think (the life without parole option) is a very significant factor in what’s changed the landscape in states like Ohio,” said Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. Since 2005, prosecutors have been able to seek life without parole without also seeking the death penalty, he noted.

Nine U.S. death row inmates were exonerated and freed in 2009, the report said. None was from Ohio, but Cleveland’s Joseph D’Ambrosio in March was freed on bond after 20 years on death row. Years after his 1989 conviction, defense attorneys learned that prosecutors hid evidence that may have proven his innocence. Ohio Public Defender Timothy Young said he expects a federal judge to dismiss the charges against D’Ambrosio soon.

Ohio was in the spotlight this year, as the failed execution of Broom led the state to adopt an unprecedented one-drug intravenous method with an intramuscular-injection backup if usable veins can’t be found.

“It would be fair to say Ohio has been the main focus of death penalty litigation in the U.S. and the world,” Young said.

2009:

Daniel Wilson, 39, of Lorain County, was executed June 3 for the 1991 murder of a 24-year-old Carol Lutz of Elyria. Wilson locked her in the trunk of her car, stuffed a rag into the gas tank and set the car on fire.

John Fautenberry, 46, admitted to slaying five people in four states. Ohio executed him on July 14 for killing a man who had picked him up when he was hitchhiking in Hamilton County in 1991.

Dayton “Christmas killer” Marvallous Keene, 36, went to his death July 21 for the Dec. 24-26, 1992, “thrill killings” of five of the six people in the city’s worst murder spree.

Jason Getsy, 33, died by lethal injection Aug. 18 for a botched 1995 murder-for-hire plot in which he shot the target’s mother, 66-year-old Ann Serafino of Trumbull County.

After an unprecedented failed lethal injection attempt on Romell Broom of Cleveland on Sept. 14, Ohio adopted the nation’s first one-drug execution protocol with an intramuscular-injection backup. The one-drug system was used Dec. 8 to execute Kenneth Biros, 41, who sexually mutilated, strangled and dismembered a 22-year-old woman in Trumbull County in 1991.

Scheduled for 2010:

Jan. 7: Vernon Smith (Lucas County): He shot a Toledo storeowner in a 1993 robbery.

Feb. 4: Mark Brown (Mahoning County): In 1994, Brown shot two employees of a Youngstown market.

March 9: Lawrence Reynolds (Summit County): The Akron man murdered his 67-year-old neighbor after tying her up and trying to rape her in 1994. He reportedly took friends to her home to see her body.*

April 20: Darryl Durr (Cuyahoga County): In 1988, Durr raped 16-year-old Angel O’Nan in Elyria, strangled her with a dog chain and hid her partially clad body in a park.*

May 13: Michael Beuke (Hamilton County): Known as “the Mad Hitchhiker,” he shot a man who picked him up on Interstate 275 in Union Twp. in 1983. He was also convicted of two similar, nonfatal shootings of motorists.

June 10: Richard Nields (Hamilton County): In 1997, Nields murdered his girlfriend after she asked him to move out of her house in Finneytown.

* Gov. Ted Strickland pushed back the executions of Reynolds and Durr from fall 2009 to 2010 to give prison officials time to rewrite the execution protocol. No new date has been set for Romell Broom.

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