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What if death row prisoners participated in political debate?
Do people sentenced to death agree with Gov. Mike DeWine? He helped write Ohio’s death penalty law, but now says that delays in carrying out executions have undercut its purpose: to punish and deter murder.
Do they think the governor was courageous for publicizing his change of heart or cowardly for not commuting the sentences of more than 100 people on Ohio’s death row to life in prison without parole?
What would a condemned person do if allowed to live the rest of their days in prison? Would they make the best of a life behind bars or welcome death?
And what, for the families of convicted people, are the emotional and financial costs of death sentences that take decades to carry out?
The Marshall Project, led by the Cleveland team, reached out to nearly 50 people on Ohio’s death row to ask these and other questions. Sixteen people wrote back, offering a rare perspective from people ignored in the political debate over whether Ohio should become the 24th state to abolish the death penalty.
– Doug Livingston
The story started with counting death row prisoners
When Gov. Mike DeWine urged lawmakers last month to abolish the death penalty, an accurate count of Ohio’s death row population seemed worth knowing. The media, though, reported several different numbers.
I examined state prison records and quickly noticed that seven people with death sentences had apparently died while awaiting execution.
But the name of one person who is alive and no longer on death row defied such an easy explanation.
This simple fact-check (there are actually 106 people on Ohio’s death row after another person died, apparently of natural causes, according to state prison officials) would lead me to another fundamental question: Has DeWine ever commuted a death sentence to life without parole and, if so, why?
Gregory Lott, an intellectually disabled man convicted of killing an elderly man by setting him on fire during a home burglary in 1986, was on the state’s list of scheduled executions.
Lott was fourth in line, though state prison records show he is no longer on death row. So why had the state granted Lott a reprieve?
The answer is that DeWine, in articulating why he now opposed Ohio’s death penalty, neglected to tell the public that he had commuted Lott’s sentence to life without parole only weeks earlier. It was the only time that the two-term governor, who leaves office in January, has extended mercy to death row.
DeWine’s commutation letter explained his standard, at least in this case: Prosecutors did not dispute that Lott was mentally unfit, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that executing disabled people is a cruel and unusual punishment, and the victim’s family opposed the death penalty.
– Doug Livingston
What happens when a jail can’t handle its own emergencies?
In a collaboration between The Marshall Project’s Cleveland, St. Louis and Jackson newsrooms, reporters analyzed hundreds of emergency calls made from inside local jails. The records revealed patterns of violence, overdoses, mental health crises and medical emergencies that overwhelmed jail staff.
Officials at the Cuyahoga County jail made 845 calls for emergency assistance last year. Some calls showed that people detained had swallowed bleach or objects like batteries, or tried to hang themselves. When jail workers called 911, records suggest they did not always know how to respond to an emergency or even accurately identify their location to dispatchers.
– Brittany Hailer
Ask TMP - Cleveland
One of the most important parts of journalism is listening.
Every day, people across Cuyahoga County have questions about the criminal justice system, but they don’t always know where to turn for reliable information. That’s why we’re launching Ask TMP - Cleveland, a new way to directly engage with our readers. Have a question about the criminal justice system? Curious about one of our stories? Wondering how we report on an issue or why it matters? Have a question about reentry after prison or jail? We’d like to hear from you.
Ask TMP - Cleveland is not legal advice, legal representation or advocacy. We can’t provide legal guidance, intervene in individual cases or investigate every question we receive. What we can do is listen. Your questions help us better understand what people in our community want to know and where our journalism can provide greater clarity.
Send me an email with your question and I will do my best to answer it in a future column — especially if I receive the same question from several readers. While we can’t promise every question will be answered or become part of our reporting, every submission will be reviewed by me.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Ask TMP - Cleveland. Your questions matter.
Email Louis Fields at lfields@themarshallproject.org
Around the 216
- The city of Akron is tripling its investment in a pilot program that sends people into neighborhoods to build relationships hoping to deescalate conflicts and connect residents with resources before violence erupts. News 5
- When people in the Cleveland area deal with the aftermath of gun violence, resources to help them heal are lacking. A recent study found, “Three out of four Northeast Ohioans who experience violence — shootings, stabbings and assaults — didn’t get one or more resources they needed afterward.” Signal Cleveland
