As a young state legislator 45 years ago, DeWine helped craft the Ohio death penalty statute. Now, the 79-year-old Republican governor, who is term-limited and will be out of office in 2027, claims that data indicates the death penalty is not working as intended to deter crime, reports Associated Press.
DeWine cited the exceedingly long wait times that elapse as legal appeals play out for those on death row. He said condemned murderers are increasingly unlikely to ever be executed, sometimes dying by natural causes or by suicide before their execution date arrives.
Over the years as governor, he has postponed many scheduled executions, and now he calls for Ohio to abolish the death penalty.
Tom Zawistowski is president of the Ohio-based We the People Convention.
"We've always felt that Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, has been a RINO (Republican in Name Only) at best and a closet Democrat in reality, and this is a classic Democrat idea," Zawistowski says.
DeWine doesn't have the right, he says, to abolish the death penalty in Ohio.
"What governors do — and you see this all over the country — is they commute the sentence, they pardon at the last minute, they just keep playing the game of just ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’” states Zawistowski. “We went through that whole charade the last 10 years about how these chemicals that they were injecting in these inmates to carry out the death sentence were cruel and inhuman, and it's disgusting."
Some states, he says, are authorizing the use of a firing squad.
"I'm all for that. I think that's exactly what they should do, and they should televise them live because people should know that if you do these horrible, heinous acts to innocent people, you're going to pay a horrible price,” says Zawistowski. “But we don't do that, and what do we have? We got way too much crime going on, particularly in Democrat cities."
