A perennial bill to abolish Ohio’s death penalty got another hearing Wednesday morning, but there’s little time left for it to move this year, and the lawmaker who has proposed similar provisions each session for a decade said that she’s not sure it has the votes.
Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood) said Wednesday it’s been a slow burn, across several legislative sessions, to get colleagues across the aisle on board.
Wednesday morning was the first hearing in almost exactly a year for her bipartisan Senate Bill 101. An identical bipartisan bill, House Bill 259, has not had a hearing in more than a year. Neither have moved from their original committees.
“I don’t know that the votes are there at this point. And here’s the other thing, we still have yet to figure out whether there are the votes on the floor or not, and we also don’t know what in the world the House is doing,” Antonio said in an interview.
A growing contingent of Republican lawmakers oppose the death penalty in practice, but Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) said it’s far from most of the caucus’s members.
RELATED - Attorney general report says Ohio's death penalty is 'unworkable' as he backs bill to change it
“There may be a few members,” Huffman said Wednesday. “I do not think it will pass in this General Assembly.”
Even on the Senate committee the bill is being heard, members are torn.
“I don’t know where I’m going to be on this bill,” said Sen. Matt Dolan (R-Chagrin Falls) on Wednesday. “There are powerful arguments on both sides.”
Among the many arguments for and against the issue, abolition advocates like Antonio say innocent Ohioans could be executed—pointing to powerful stories from death row exonerees. But the bill’s opponents often say it’s a crime deterrent reserved for “the worst of the worst.”
SB 101 bill will get at least one more hearing this year, though a vote is very unlikely.
More than 100 men and one woman are incarcerated on death row in Ohio, according to Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections data. The state has not gone through with an execution since July 2018, closing in on six years and extending the entirety of Gov. Mike DeWine’s tenure.
The standstill is due, in part, to pharmaceutical companies’ opposition to use of their products in the drug concoction that creates a lethal injection. A spokesperson for DeWine, a Republican, said earlier this year the governor hadn’t changed his stance on the issue, calling the use of lethal injection an “untenable situation.”
But a few prosecutors and other backers of the death penalty have said that is an excuse—with some in the legislature eyeing possible alternative procedures like the use of nitrogen gas.
RELATED - DeWine shares few thoughts about bill to add nitrogen to Ohio's death penalty options
Antonio believes DeWine could be an ally in her ongoing efforts, she said, by rallying fellow Republicans.
“I want to continue to have conversations with him.” she said. “That would be wonderful if he would do that. I think it could be part of his legacy to actually end the death penalty, use of the death penalty on his watch.”
Though time is running out on that front, too. DeWine has less than two years left as governor, and at least one likely candidate to succeed him—Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost—has been a vocal proponent of why the death penalty should remain on the books, though he calls the current system “unworkable.”
