Two Republican and two Democrat state legislators announced March 28 they had introduced legislation to end Ohio’s death penalty and limit the most severe punishment for murder to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

For Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins, Ohio’s longest-serving elected county prosecutor, the news is less like being poked in the face than being punched in the gut over and over.

After personally obtaining convictions in 46 murder trials during his 10 years as assistant prosecutor and 39 years as elected prosecutor, including nine convictions resulting in the death penalty, he has seen numerous attempts by some officials to limit the punishment for killers.

One is a 2021 change in state law limiting the punishment of juvenile murderers, such as Jacob LaRosa of Niles, who killed his elderly neighbor, Marie Belcastro. Another is a 2021 Ohio law that exempted defendants from the death penalty if they can show they have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness and at the time of the offense their condition impaired their ability to exercise rational judgment.

And Watkins has seen appeals for death-row inmates, such as Danny Lee Hill of Warren, drag on for decades — in the case of Hill, since shortly after Watkins was first elected prosecutor in 1984. Hill and co-defendant Timothy Combs brutalized and murdered Raymond Fife, 12, in 1985.

“I think the death penalty must be enforced. The present law works if the people are doing their jobs,” Watkins said. “There is a need for the death penalty. I believe you will find that the overwhelming majority of Trumbull Countians believe that Danny Lee Hill should be executed.”

Watkins said that during the nearly 50 years he has worked at the Trumbull prosecutor’s office, “I have been, this office, my assistants have been doing our jobs, the juries have spoken. We have people guilty beyond all doubt, and some of them have been executed, and the rest should be executed. It’s taking too long.”

Changes that have been made in Ohio law have lessened “the rights of victims of crime,” he said. “We need the death penalty (for the) worst of the worst.”

Watkins last week provided the newspaper with an eight-page summary of his thoughts on legislators’ efforts to repeal Ohio’s death penalty and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s recent comments urging state legislators to “initiate a much needed, long-overdue debate about our state’s broken capital-punishment system.”

“While I agree with the attorney general that there may be issues with Ohio’s current death penalty approach, I am not ready to ‘end’ it, nor do I believe that an ‘overhaul’ is required,” Watkins said. “Quite simply, the current law is working.”

He said that includes the guilt / innocence part of a murder trial and the punishment phase of a murder trial, “and even during the initial round” of death-penalty appeals.

Of the 46 homicide cases Watkins tried, “approximately 20 case were indicted as capital cases, and nine resulted in death sentences,” he said. Three killers — Kenneth Biros, Roderick Davie and Jason Getsy — were executed.

MAHONING PROSECUTOR

Mahoning County Prosecutor Gina DeGenova is new among Ohio’s 88 prosecutors, replacing longtime prosecutor Paul Gains when he retired late last year. She has appeared in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court in murder cases in recent years, including the cases involving the murder of Rowan Sweeney, 4, from Struthers.

When asked for her opinion on the death penalty, she said, “I support it as a sanction in light of the fact that it is acceptable in Ohio, and I’ll continue to seek it as a sanction in cases warranting this penalty.

“As a prosecutor, I don’t get to make the laws, right? I have to follow the laws. I will continue to do that here until our Legislature says otherwise. I know there are issues with the current system. I know there are complaints that have been made. It’s costly.

“I know it costs more to incarcerate someone on death row than to incarcerate them (for life). I also know it’s a lengthy process. I support attempts by our Legislature to remedy these issues.”

AGREES WITH YOST

Watkins agrees with Yost’s assessment that “Ohio imposes death sentences on perpetrators of brutal and revolting murders, then spends years debating, reviewing, appealing and failing to act on those decisions.”

He agreed when Yost said executions are delayed because Ohio lacks the drugs to carry out the state’s system of lethal injection and because inmates are “taking advantage of multiple avenues for appeal.”

Watkins’ summary states that “the failure not only to administer this just punishment (execution) but to do so in a timely fashion is the real reason the current death penalty system appears to be ‘broken.'”

“Public support for the death penalty is strong; if it were not, juries would not continue to unanimously endorse the ultimate penalty. Unfortunately, executions have come to a halt, reportedly because of the unavailability of the execution drug. The last inmate put to death in Ohio was Robert Van Hook on July 18, 2018, nearly five years ago,” Watkins said.

During that time, 11 other states and the federal government have carried out 90 death sentences, 85 by lethal injection and five by electrocution, he stated.

The “criminal justice system is not functioning properly when it fails to apply the state law and carry out the death penalty,” Watkins stated. “This delay is occurring on two fronts: postponements occasioned by the repeated rounds of appeals, predominantly in the federal courts” and issues over lethal injection drugs not being available.

Watkins said the sponsors of the new legislation to end Ohio’s death penalty cite the cost of carrying out the death penalty as a reason to end it. But he cites the case of Claudia Hoerig, the Brazilian woman who killed her husband in Newton Falls, then returned to Brazil and evaded prosecution for 11 years until Watkins was able to bring her back for trial. She was convicted and is serving a sentence of 28 years to life in prison.

“The pursuit of justice often necessitates hard work and high cost,” Watkins stated. “If time and cost were the controlling factor, (Claudia Hoerig) would have never been returned to face justice for the execution-style murder of her husband. U.S. Air Force Maj. Karl Hoerig,” Watkins stated.

“When the system’s officials neglect or delay performing their duties, it is easy for the public to surmise the system is not working,” Watkins added. “When Danny Lee Hill remains on death row after 37 years and 25-plus appeals and counting, there is no certainty that the law has any meaning.”

POSSIBLE MODIFICATIONS

He said the Ohio Legislature, “the very governmental entity now seeking to abolish the death penalty because there have been no executions, has sat idle since 2018, failing to approve other lethal drugs; re-enact previously constitutionally approved execution methods, such as the electric chair or firing squad; or adopt other approaches, such as nitrogen hypoxia.”

Watkins said he believes the death-penalty law works, but he is “amenable to possible modifications to the current law to ensure that the death penalty is preserved for the worst of the worst offenders.”

He proposes limiting the death penalty to cases involving multiple victims, serial killers, police murders, child murders or extreme torture cases and “requiring that the murder was committed with prior calculation and design.” He also proposes “requiring proof of identity (of the killer) immediately upon indictment, rather than at trial, with the right to an immediate appeal on that issue.”

Watkins said he has heard unfounded arguments being used to justify ending capital punishment. An Ohio senator said during a hearing on the death penalty last week that capital punishment has been used as a bargaining chip to get someone to plead guilty to a lesser offense.

“I am unaware of any support for such a claim,” he said, adding that his office “does not plea bargain the worst of the worst violent offenders where police investigations of heinous crimes demonstrate overwhelming evidence of guilt.”

He said, “Another common and never-ending criticism of the death penalty is based on the “proportionality argument,” Watkins said. That is the idea that one person involved in a murder did not get the death penalty, so nobody should.

“The only unfairness would be that a guilty person got away with murder. It can never be unfair to give an offender the sentence he deserved.”

LEGISLATORS

A news release from Sen. Hercel Craig, a Democrat from Columbus, one of the sponsors of the effort to eliminate the death penalty, focused on the “pragmatic” reasons for ending capital punishment in Ohio.

The release quoted Sen. Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, a Democrat from Lakewood, as saying she and the three other bill sponsors “join a growing call for abolition, against a backdrop of public opinion, which increasingly favors life sentences over the use of the death penalty in Ohio and across the nation.”

The release provided a link to a February 2021 online poll showing 54 percent of Ohioans preferred some form of life in prison over the death penalty as punishment for murder.

It also cited “disparities across racial and economic lines” as a reason for ending the death penalty, providing a link to a September 2020 report by the Death Penalty Information Center called “The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty.”

That report referenced the deaths caught on video of black Americans Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of police officers.

Antonio and Sen. Steve Huffman, a Republican from near Dayton, introduced the measure in the previous session of the General Assembly, but it “failed to get any traction, as it has for several legislative sessions despite support from some of the majority Republicans,” according to the Associated Press.

VICTIM’S MOM

Nivia Ramos is the mother of Crystal Hernandez, 23, who was shot to death in her home on Youngstown’s East Side on Jan. 24, 2019, by a bullet apparently intended for her boyfriend, who was not home. Ramos was holding her 2-year-old son when she was killed. Her son was not injured.

Ramos said she would have preferred that the five men convicted in her daughter’s death would have been eligible for the death penalty.

Ramos, who does not live in Ohio, said: “I believe in God. I think the death penalty should still be in effect. Why? Because I lost someone who I loved dearly. She was a victim of crime.”

Ramos said she is aware that some states have made it easier to carry a gun, including Ohio, and that concerns her, just as it concerns her that Ohio might end the death penalty. In June 2022, a new Ohio law made it legal to conceal a firearm without a permit for anyone 21 and older if they are not prohibited for other reasons.

The six men who fired 53 shots into the home were 18 to 22 years old at the time. Ramos made memorable remarks at sentencing for the defendant who went on trial, Larenz Rhodes, saying the lesson of her daughter’s death is, “Do not play with guns. There is justice and there is a God.”

She said during a telephone interview recently that without the death penalty, the message to people shooting guns is “OK. We’ll just give you jail time, that’s it. You didn’t do anything. You’re living, but the other person’s dead. I really think there should be a penalty, not just life in prison. My daughter didn’t deserve to get killed.”

ATTORNEY GENERAL

Two days after the introduction of the bill, Yost released his office’s statutorily required annual Capital Crimes Report with a news release, saying he supports the death penalty but he urges Ohio elected leaders “to initiate a much-needed, long-overdue debate about our state’s broken capital-punishment system.”

He stated that 336 people have received a combined 341 death sentences from 1981 through Dec. 31, 2022, in Ohio, but “only 56 sentences — just one in every six — have been carried out.” One reason is the lack of lethal injection drugs.

Yost said the state’s death-penalty system “is not fairly, equally or promptly enforced, and because of that, it invites distrust and disrespect for the rule of law.”

He has “become increasingly convinced that something must be done about the massive amount of time, money and litigation expended on death-penalty cases that linger.”

In Mahoning County, the shooting death of 4-year-old Rowan Sweeney in September 2020 has shown the amount of time and money involved in prosecuting two men eligible for the death penalty in the case — Kimonie Bryant, 26, and Andre McCoy Jr., 22.

About 2 1/2 years after Rowan’s death, with his father, David Sweeney, attending multiple hearings per month in common pleas court, the case against Brandon Crump Jr., 20, is set for trial Oct. 2, but that is being put in jeopardy by recently discovered evidence relating to the January 2023 arrest of McCoy, who was at large for more than two years after the killing. Crump cannot get the death penalty because he was a juvenile at the time of the killing.

DEFENSE LAWYER

Attorney John Juhasz said it’s not his place as a defense attorney to offer an opinion on whether there should be a death penalty, but he has been involved in murder cases for decades and sees “things that are problematic about it.”

He said one problem is the length of time it takes for a death sentence to be carried out. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court “issued an opinion that said death is different than anything else we do to human beings for punishment.

“So because of that, people get frustrated with all of the appeals and all of the motions, and everything else. But really the genesis of it is we are doing something that is irreversible and is more serious than anything else we do. So we have to follow as many steps to make it right.

“So that results in a lot more work for lawyers in courts, a lot of extra work and expense for the prosecutor’s office. And if the death penalty case is being paid for by appointed counsel (there is) a lot of extra cost for the public.”

He talked about the complicated appeals process for individuals sentenced to death — a direct appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court, post-conviction relief proceedings, and “when all of those are exhausted, you go to federal court” for habeas corpus proceedings.

He said state officials have taken measures to shorten and restrict the amount of time it takes for death-penalty appeals, but they have “backfired.”

For example, in 1995, Ohio voters eliminated death sentence appeals to the Ohio appeals courts and sent the case “straight to the Ohio Supreme Court,” he said.

“They did that because in 1994 when George Voinovich was governor, he made a state-of-the-state address urging a constitutional amendment, and he did it in reaction to the murder of a correctional officer in Lucasville (prison). They thought they would speed it up.”

But because the step eliminated vetting of the cases that took place at the appeals court, that duty fell to the Ohio Supreme Court. He said it now takes about three years for death-penalty appeals to get a ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court.

“I’m not saying it’s their fault. I’m just saying it’s an unintended consequence. Instead of speeding it up, it slowed it down.”

He said something similar happened when officials tried to speed up the federal habeas corpus process, which has consumed the Danny Lee Hill case in recent months and years.

Juhasz said the cost for a death penalty case is thought to be double or triple the cost of life sentence — $2 million to $3 million for a death penalty case and about $1 million for a life-in-prison case. “It’s clearly more expensive,” Juhasz said of death-penalty cases.

Juhasz said the book “Among the Lowest of the Dead” by David Von Drehl points to the frustration the families of murder victims experience in the years after the killer is sentenced to death. He said he believes the families do not realize what a long road it will be.

“If you had an 8-year-old (child), and some guy broke into your house and kidnapped your daughter and raped her and murdered her, you would want to kill the son of a bitch yourself. That’s what every victim’s family wants to do.

“But what Von Drehle found is because … of the procedures to make sure we get it right, sometimes the victim’s families get frustrated and say, ‘You know what? If he would have just had life in prison, we’d move on. We’d have closure. I think there is something to consider for the victim’s family: (By eliminating the death penalty) they might not get the ultimate punishment, but they get closure.”