New report spotlights concerns with background of 26 Ohio condemned scheduled for execution in coming months and years
In this post earlier this year, I reported on a significant report produced by the Fair Punishment Project (FPP) examining the background and case history of eight death row defendants in Arkansas who had approaching execution dates. That March 2017 Arkansas report from FPP was titled "Prisoners on Arkansas’s Execution List Defined By Mental Illness, Intellectual Disability, and Bad Lawyering," and I am inclined to assert that the FPP report played a role in a few of these Arkansas defendants getting their executions stayed.
Now FPP has turned its eye to the Buckeye State now that Ohio has gotten its machinery of death operating again, and FPP's latest report here is titled "Prisoners on Ohio’s Execution List Defined by Intellectual Impairment, Mental Illness, Trauma, and Young Age." Here is how this report gets started:
On July 26, 2017, Ohio ended its three-year execution moratorium and put Ronald Phillips to death. Phillips, 19 at the time he committed his crime, had the intellectual functioning of a juvenile, had a father who sexually abused him, and grew up a victim of and a witness to unspeakable physical abuse — information his trial lawyers never learned or presented to a jury.
Ohio intends to execute three more people in 2017 and then 23 more between 2018 and 2020. We examined the cases of these 26 men, relying on available legal pleadings, court opinions, and where accessible, trial testimony. We found that these men are among the most impaired and traumatized among us — a pattern replicated across America’s death rows. At least 17 out of the 26 men experienced serious childhood trauma — horrifying instances of extensive physical and sexual abuse. At least six men appear to suffer from a mental illness, and at least 11 have evidence of intellectual disability, borderline intellectual disability, or a cognitive impairment, including brain injury. Three were under the age of 21 at the time they committed their offenses, a period during which an individual’s brain, especially the section related to impulse control and decision-making, is still underdeveloped. Many of these men fall within several of these categories, which compounds the impairments.
We use the term “at least” because three of these men waived the presentation of mitigation at their trials. And several had lawyers who conducted little to no investigation at both the trial and post-conviction phase or failed to seek the assistance of psychologists and other experts, despite the presence of familial mental illness, which is often hereditary. Therefore, in those cases, we know very little about existing impairments, even though execution dates are looming.
The Constitution mandates that the state restrict the use of the death penalty to only those “whose extreme culpability makes them ‘the most deserving of execution,’” regardless of the severity of their crimes. The individuals identified here have been convicted of horrible crimes, and they must be held to account. But the evidence suggests that Ohio has not met its constitutional obligation. It is instead planning to execute nearly two dozen individuals with substantial impairments, rather than reserving the punishment for those with the greatest culpability.
Below, we describe some of the stories we uncovered while researching these 26 Ohio cases. We have grouped them by category of impairment which includes serious trauma, mental illness and intellectual disability, and youth. These distinctions, however, are artificial — many of these men have heartbreaking stories falling within multiple categories. For each example of a debilitating impairment, we could have included many other equally terrifying stories about those facing a sentence of death.
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