Taking death off the table
Last year, there were 89 death penalty cases brought in
Ohio. The distribution was, shall we
say, uneven. Of Ohio's 88 counties, 62 of them brought no
capital cases at all. Only four counties
had five or more: Lucas with five,
Hamilton and Lorain with six, Mahoning with eight...
... and Cuyahoga County with 34.
Of course, that wasn't until about $120,000 in taxpayer
money had been spent for lawyers, mitigation experts, defense investigators,
and the like. As the Supreme Court has
reminded us from time to time, death is a qualitatively different punishment,
and that means the normally penurious compensation provided to attorneys for
indigent defendants gets ratcheted up several notches. One of the two death sentences imposed in
Cuyahoga County over the last three years (out of 135 indicted capital cases)
was for Anthony Sowell, who kidnapped and raped 11 women over several
years. The case dragged on for two
years, culminating in a two-month trial that cost over $600,000 in defense
expenditures. (That's for trial; it's
likely that appeals and post-conviction can run the tab into several million
dollars more.) And that was in addition
to the costs of the other capital cases:
50 in 2010, 37 in 2011. Look at
it this way: the total expenditures for
death penalty cases in 2010 and 2011 in this county came to slightly over $2.8
million, more than twice as much as was spent in the other 87 counties
combined.
Mason decided to retire last year, and five candidates ran
for his seat. All of them agreed on one
thing: they would drastically reduce the
number of death penalty cases. The guy
who came out on top, Tim McGinty, has proven true to his word. No new capital cases have been indicted since
McGinty took office in November, and the death specs in seven others have been
removed.
Few would have figured McGinty to have followed through so
rigorously on his campaign rhetoric. He's
a former prosecutor, and his 18 years of service as a common pleas judge rarely
saw an attorney who drew his name in the arraignment room respond with
fist-pumps of jubilation. His reticence
to seek capital indictments is almost certainly spurred by considerations of
money and effort, rather than by any disquiet at the prospects of executing
someone.
It may be a simple reflection of reality. It's not as though Mason's record of
obtaining a death sentence in only seven out of 400 tries solely reflected the
weakness of the cases; Cuyahoga County juries have been exceedingly reluctant
to impose the penalty, even in situations where they were routinely handed down
ten or twenty years ago, such as in cop-killings. In fact, in the last couple of years, the
only defendant besides Sowell sentenced to death was Denny Obermiller, who
killed his grandparents, raped his grandmother, refused any of his lawyers'
efforts to defend him, and (successfully) taunted the three-judge panel into
imposing the death sentence, calling them "idiots" for deigning to ask him
questions during the mitigation hearing.
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