Despite each killing three people, and one killing a child, neither Hoffman nor Littleton faced the death penalty. Instead they plead guilty in exchange for sentences of life in prison with no chance of parole. It’s a scenario that is happening more and more frequently in Ohio.

If the murders had occurred six years ago, prosecutors could not have sought life without parole without first pursuing a capital murder case. A 2005 law now makes that possible. That’s on top of a 1996 law which gives juries the option of choosing life-in-prison over execution.

“It does give prosecutors and defense attorneys another option and it gives juries another option,” said Knox County Prosecutor John Thatcher.

Thatcher struck the plea agreement with Matthew Hoffman, who killed the women and the boy.

“I think it’s more likely than not that juries since 1996 have come to the right result when they have the option, and have come back with death verdicts as opposed to life without parole verdicts,” he said.

Since the law changes, there have been sharp declines in death penalty indictments and sentences. Indictments have declined 24 percent. And death sentences by more than half.

Andrew Welsh-Huggins is a legal affairs reporter for the Associated Press and wrote a book on the history of Ohio’s death penalty. Welsh-Huggins said he thinks it’s clear juries like to have an option other than death.

“I think what the effect it’s having, though, is the type of individual that’s being sentenced to death now by juries say is probably closer to what lawmakers envisioned 30 years ago, what they call the worst of the worst,” Welsh-Huggins said.

While it’s ultimately up to prosecutors to decide which punishment to seek, death or life, victims’ families carry some weight on the decision. Thatcher used the plea bargain to convince Hoffman to tell police where he hid the victims’ bodies. And Thatcher said he explained to the victims’ families that a death penalty case and the appeals process can last more than a decade.

“For them I think there were a number of reasons that made the life without parole option what they wanted, and on the day they made that decision it was: they wanted to recover their loved ones,” he said.

Thatcher said he would have pursued Hoffman’s execution if the case took place 15 years ago.

Logan County Prosecutor Gerald Heaton said he, too, would have pursued a death penalty case against Samuel Littleton.

“We wouldn’t want to go down to a life sentence because then, after 20 years or 25 years or 30 years, it would be up to the parole authority as to whether or not he got out of jail. So we would have been forced pretty much because of the type of crime it was to go to trial,” Heaton said.

Because of the changes in Ohio law, some have argued for a review of all death penalty cases, especially those sentenced to die before 1996.

Ohio Public Defender Tim Young said he thinks there should be a complete review of all of the death row cases.

“Of all of those people on death row that we’re currently executing, the vast majority, if indicted today, either wouldn’t be indicted with death or they would be given LWOP even if they were indicted with death,” Young said.

Young predicts within ten years Ohio will no longer have a death penalty. Writer Andrew Welsh-Huggins disagrees, but he predicts a significant decline in the death row population over the next few decades.

“There’s just fewer people being indicted on death penalty charges, and there’s fewer people being sentenced to death. So ultimately it’s going to become a very small, but continuing part of our legal system,” Welsh-Huggins said.

And in tight budget times, there’s the cost issue. Studies have shown that trying death penalty cases and housing death row inmates is up to three times the cost of inmates serving life sentences.

The latest was Daniel Wilson, who was put to death by lethal injection this week.

Associated Press reporter Andrew Welsh-Huggins has been researching Ohio’s death penalty law, and he says he’s found wide discrepancies in how it’s applied. In some counties, he says, plea bargains are common, while prosecutors in other counties won’t offer deals to people facing the death penalty.

Welsh Huggins has written a book on the death penalty in Ohio. He says there are some 40 people who’ve been on death row for more than 20 years, and so Ohio will likely carry out several executions a year for the next several years. But he says fewer people are being sentenced to death – only about three cases a year statewide end up in a death sentence.

Strickland on Monday turned down the request for mercy from Daniel Wilson, scheduled to die Wednesday for the 1991 death of Carol Lutz in Elyria.

Wilson’s attorney Daniel Doughten says he got the call from Strickland’s office Monday morning.

Also Monday, Wilson asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay his execution while he pursues appeals of his conviction on the grounds the jury heard misinformation about the indictment against him.

Wilson set the car on fire with Lutz inside despite her pleas that she would forget about the incident if he let her go.

A team of ABA lawyers has taken its own look over the past 2-and-a-half years and concludes that there are racial and geographic imbalances and other flaws in the way capital punishment is administered in the state.

The study says many defendants receive inadequate legal help and says ways to guard death row inmates’ rights are missing from the system. The ABA team says, for example, that there should be a requirement that all DNA evidence from a case be preserved while an offender is on death row.

Streib is the author of the upcoming book The Fairer Death: “Executing Women in Ohio.” He says it is difficult to determine why three of the women were sentenced to die. But in the case of Anna Marie Hahn, there was no doubt.

Hahn was 23-year-old when she came to the United States from Germany in 1929. She lived briefly with a distant relative in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati. Shortly after her arrival, Hahn began the activities that would take her to the electric chair nine years later.

Ohio author Diana Britt Franklin spent five years studying Hahn’s life and death. She says Hahn had a habit of betting on horses. “To feed the habit, she devised ways to get money out of old men and women, but especially men. She would say ‘Give me a hundred or give me fifty.’ In several instances, she took every nickel they had before she killed them.”

Franklin’s book on Hahn, “The Goodbye Door,” comes out next month. Franklin says she is puzzled why no one else has written a book about the woman nicknamed by the media the “Blonde Borgia.” Franklin explains: “She was indicted on two murders. All of her murders were poisons, arsenic, and she was convicted of one murder. She’d always maintained her innocence. After she died, they found a confession in her cell. She confessed to four murders, but she probably poisoned a dozen or so people. Nobody really knows.”

Not everyone Hahn poisoned died. One survivor was her husband, Philip Hahn. Franklin says, the two were estranged. Among other things, he was afraid of her.

Anna Marie Hahn’s trial began October 11, 1937, lasted more than three weeks and attracted reporters from many of the country’s largest cities. Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Charles Bell presided. Despite extensive publicity and a defense team that was inexperienced in capital cases, Franklin believes Hahn got a fair trial. But in the end, everyone associated with the trial got a big surprise. “No one expected her to be sentenced – especially by a jury with 11 women – without mercy,” says Franklin.

Judge Bell pronounced the sentence, and according to Franklin, “For the rest of his life, he found it hard to face that even though he was convinced she was guilty, he didn’t expect to have to give her the death penalty which was mandatory from the jury’s verdict. He broke down and cried after the sentencing.”

Ohio Northern Law Professor Victor Streib says, judges years ago not only refused to impose the death penalty on a woman, they explained why in open court. “In older cases,” Streib says, “judges would say ‘In respect to my mother, my sisters, my wife, I will not sentence you to die. If you were a man, I would.’

Streib says Hahn was the exception. She killed more than once. “Serial killers are unusual whether they’re men or women. Almost everyone who kills once won’t kill again.”

When Hahn was sentenced to die in 1937, Ohio had no death row facilities for women. She became the only woman among 4200 inmates at the Ohio Penitentiary. Franklin describes the cell built specially for Hahn as being large, with a bed, desk, rocking chair ..and curtains.

Although she could hear them, Hahn did not see her fellow death row inmates until the day guards walked her to the electric chair. Franklin says the prisoners stood at their cell doors and said, “Goodbye, Anna, goodbye.”

Franklin says up to this moment, Hahn had remained stoic, convinced she would not be executed. That changed. “She was really very scared as soon as they opened the ‘goodbye door,’ Franklin says. “The ‘goodbye door’ is what the prisoners called the door to the death chamber. Soon as they opened that and she faced the electric chair, she collapsed, screamed, and carried on. The warden said he’d never seen anything like it.”

Professor Streib notes, in death penalty cases, the sentence is based on the seriousness of the crime plus the background and character of the defendant. “Women usually have more sympathetic records and lives,” says Streib. “They are less likely to kill while committing another felony. They usually get a little mercy when sentencing time comes.”

However, in the Hahn case, author Diana Britt Franklin, like the jury in Hahn’s trial, was unable to show mercy. “I was trying to find a way to be sympathetic to her case, her plight, but you just couldn’t be sympathetic with her. She was just an evil person.”

The time that elapsed between Anna Marie Hahn’s arrest in Cincinnati and the date of her execution in Columbus was sixteen months.