COLUMBUS, Ohio (LifeSiteNews) – Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called for abolishing the death penalty in the Buckeye State, formally disavowing a stance he played a key role in enacting.
Cleveland.com reported that DeWine, who co-authored a law to reinstate capital punishment in 1981 after the state’s previous death penalty law was struck down, announced during a recent press conference that he once “believed that in some cases the death penalty could serve as a deterrent” but no longer does.
“The odds of the death penalty actually being carried out are very low,” DeWine said, noting that Ohio’s last 10 capital cases averaged 21 years between conviction and execution. “And if it is carried out, odds are it will take a long, long time.”
DeWine has consistently postponed executions since becoming governor in 2019, prompting speculation as to whether he will commute the 113 death row sentences currently pending between now and when he leaves office in January. He has so far declined to answer.
Statehouse News Bureau noted that Republican state Attorney General Andrew Wilson does not share the governor’s opinion.
“I believe that the death penalty is a tool that should be available for prosecutors in the criminal justice system in a very limited set of cases when dealing with these most serious crimes,” Wilson said. “You can argue one way or the other on whether or not … the death penalty has a deterrent effect. But it certainly has an incapacitating effect, or it certainly serves a retribution goal for families.”
Capital punishment is one of the most contentious issues in modern politics, with ambivalence often crossing the usual partisan lines.
Proponents argue it a necessary deterrent, that it is a key tool in pushing violent offenders to plead guilty in order to evade it, and that nothing less than death can adequately register societal condemnation for humanity’s worst crimes. Opponents argue death is irreversible in cases of wrongful convictions, that its implementation often constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment,” and that society should draw a hard line against taking any life when not strictly necessary to defend one’s self or others from danger (a standard liberal opponents do not apply to their support of abortion-on-demand).
In 2018, the late Pope Francis complicated the discourse about the religious permissibility of capital punishment when he issued a papal decree revising n. 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to declare that a “new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state,” and therefore “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” It also declared that the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
The passage previously read that authorities should limit themselves to “non-lethal means (…) to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor” and “cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent,’” but granted that “traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty” when absolutely necessary.