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Death penalty is applied unevenly for Ohioans
Saturday, May 07, 2005
Andrew Welsh-Huggins
Associated Press

Columbus- Lawmakers writing a new capital punishment law two decades ago wanted a fair system for prosecuting the worst of the worst: killers whose crimes were so terrible there would be no question they deserved to die.

That didn't happen.

Ohio's death penalty has been applied inconsistently since it was enacted in 1981, according to a first-ever analysis by the Associated Press. Race, the extensive use of plea bargains and even where a crime was committed all play a role in who is sentenced to death.

The AP analyzed 1,936 indictments reported to the Ohio Supreme Court by counties with capital cases from October 1981 through 2002.

Among the findings:

• Offenders facing a death penalty charge for killing a white person were twice as likely to go to death row than if they had killed a black victim. Death sentences were handed down in 18 percent of cases where the victims were white, compared with 8.5 percent of cases where victims were black.
• Nearly half of the 1,936 capital punishment cases ended with a plea bargain. That includes 131 cases in which the crime involved two or more victims. Twenty-five people had killed at least three victims.
• In Cuyahoga County, a Democratic stronghold, just 8 percent of offenders charged with a capital crime received a death sentence. In conservative Hamilton County, 43 percent of capital offenders ended up on death row.

State Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer, who co-sponsored the death penalty law in 1981 when he was a member of Ohio's Legislature, said the findings are disturbing.

Pfeifer, a Republican, is among many who have long called for a study of how the state's law is working. He said the analysis affirms early concerns that race would come into play.

"That has to be very disconcerting and alarming to all of us," he said.

Sandra Craig's son, Jeffrey, and one of his friends were beaten to death in the summer of 1995 over drugs. Both men were black, and the men who killed them were black and white. Craig is incensed that prosecutors offered her son's killers a plea bargain that resulted in sentences of 20 years to life in prison.

"It was just another black person dead. They could just do this and move on to the next thing," said Craig of Columbus.

The race of Jeffrey Craig and his friend, Keith Johnson, played no role, said Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Doug Stead.

"If I believe the person committed this crime, my first responsibility is to take him off the streets," Stead said. "And if I have any doubt at all about my ability to do that, that might encourage me to take a plea."

There has always been a race element to the death penalty in Ohio, said David Doughten, a Cleveland defense lawyer who has handled dozens of capital cases.

"I'm not saying judges or prosecutors or anybody is overtly racist - I don't think they are - but you see it happen," Doughten said. "You see it in deals. You see it in negotiations. You see it in how things are reviewed."

Ohio and other states rewrote their death penalty laws after a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling essentially declared laws in 40 states unconstitutional.

Other studies of various state laws enacted since 1972 have found the same type of discrepancies, including a higher percentage of death sentences for those who kill whites.

In January 2003, a study commissioned by Maryland found race played a major role in how the death penalty was applied. Ray Paternoster, a University of Maryland criminologist who conducted the study, said killers whose victims were white fared the worst.

"More likely to have death sought. More likely have their case advance to the penalty phase. More likely to have death imposed," he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, in 1987 that Georgia's death penalty was constitutional despite figures indicating that killers of whites are far more likely to be sentenced to death. Justice Lewis Powell said numerous variables, including the gender and race of lawyers and judges, also could play a role.

"Apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system," Powell wrote.

Ohio prosecutors say community standards also affect the outcome of a case as well as the prosecutor's willingness to deal.

"Our criminal justice system doesn't always mete out justice and fairness in neat little packages - sometimes it's a little rough," said Wayne County Prosecutor Martin Frantz. "It's not something you can compute with calculus or with any kind of certainty as to who belongs and who doesn't on death row."

Frantz oversaw the case of Robert Buell, who was executed in 2002 for sexually assaulting and strangling 11-year-old Krista Lee Harrison two decades earlier.

Also in 2002, he handled the rape, murder and dismemberment case of 14-year-old Kristen Jackson, which ended with a plea agreement.

Kristen's parents asked Frantz to accept a plea bargain with killer Joel Yockey, saying they could not have endured a trial and years of appeals.

"If the death penalty could be imposed by the victim's family, it'd be a whole different story, but that's not the way it works," said Kristen's father, Mark. "I challenge anyone to go through the same scenario and come up with a better decision than we did."

Former Senate President Richard Finan, who sponsored Ohio's death penalty law, said too many murderers are cutting deals.

"If you commit the capital crime, you meet the specifications of the death penalty, then they ought to follow through with the death penalty," Finan said.

In Hamilton County, which had the highest number of death sentences, at 55, prosecutor Joe Deters said that as prosecutor in the 1990s, he did not accept plea bargains once he decided to seek the death penalty. He would not consider the wishes of victims' families.

"There's a lot of lazy lawyers out there. You're not here to take pleas. You're here to try cases," said Deters, a former Republican state treasurer who left office to run again for prosecutor last year.