Is death row slowing down?----Decision is 'probably the toughest' in job

Strickland, a former prison psychologist, said in an interview last week that he has "serious questions" about capital punishment.

Strickland said he's not considering a moratorium on all executions.

But by making one of his first acts as governor the delaying of 3 executions, he already has signaled that changes may be coming to the way Ohio handles its worst criminals.

The governor has authority to commute death sentences to life without parole.

In the interview, he said he is sympathetic to those suffering mental illness or retardation, but will decide on a case-by-case basis.

What he decides will matter both locally and nationally. Ohio has had one of the nation's busiest death houses since 1999; in 2 of the past 3 years,only Texas has executed more people. And of the 190 people on death row,38 were sent there from Hamilton County - more than any county in the
state.

In the interview, Strickland called capital punishment "probably the toughest" issue he faces as governor.

"One of the reasons that I wanted this delay was that I have very, very superficial knowledge of any of these cases,'' he said. "I really don't want my action here to be misinterpreted. These are life and death situations, and it's not something that I felt that I could adequately make a decision about in a compressed period of time.''

He promised to be deliberate but decisive, sensitive but not soft while reviewing death penalty cases.

Death penalty opponents in Southwest Ohio are delighted with Strickland.
They're optimistic that he will "bring a more informed human touch" to the issue, said Sister Alice Gerdeman of Cincinnati, president of Ohioans toStop Executions.

Strickland spent seven years counseling prison inmates, including some on death row. He's also a Methodist minister - and the United Methodist Church opposes the death penalty.

But to death penalty supporters, Strickland's actions are an ominous sign.

"It's shameful what they are doing to the victims' families," Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said. "When you have a sitting governor andsitting attorney general who say they are leery of the death penalty, every Ohioan should be disturbed."

Strickland's decision to delay the 3 executions comes at a watershed moment in the history of death row.

Nationally, the death penalty is on hold in 9 of the 38 states to adopt capital punishment since 1977, when states resumed executions; a 1972 Supreme Court decision had voided death penalty laws in most states.

Today courts and state lawmakers are debating the risk of executing the innocent, advances in DNA evidence and challenges to using lethal injection.

Ohio and Kentucky are the latest states with federal lawsuits
challenging lethal injection. Lawyers for seven Ohio inmates call it cruel and unusual punishment in a case to be decided soon by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals in Cincinnati.

"The governor has indicated he would be troubled if an execution took place in Ohio and a week later lethal injection was determined to be unconstitutional,'' said Keith Dailey, Strickland's spokesman.

'An unenviable responsibility'

The U.S. Supreme Court found Ohio's death penalty law - written in response to the 1972 ruling - unconstitutional in 1978; the death sentences of 120 killers were reduced to life. It took 20 years for cases against newly convicted murderers to wind their way through the courts before Wilford Lee Berry volunteered to be executed in 1999.

24 convicted killers were executed during Gov. Bob Taft's 8 years in office - including six sent to the death chamber from Greater Cincinnati.

"Gov. Taft personally reviewed each case, and he reviewed each case thoroughly," former spokesman Orest Holubec said Friday.

"It was always a difficult decision for him, and a difficult time
around the office. It's obviously a heavy and unenviable responsibility."

The lengths of Taft's written decisions denying clemency shrank since the four-page statement he released Feb. 18, 1999, the day before Berry's execution. They later were limited to several paragraphs and were no longer than one page.

In addition to reading hundreds of pages of case files, Taft's legal staff would interview the families of victims and, on occasion, death row inmates. Strickland said his staff is conducting the same kind of thorough review.

Strickland is Ohio's 1st Democratic governor since Richard Celeste, who commuted eight death sentences to life in prison as one of his final actions in January 1991. Celeste cited a "disturbing racial pattern" in death sentencing, but also took IQ and mental health into account.

Those issues remain - and remain troubling to Strickland.

Ohio has about two dozen death row inmates claiming they should not be executed because they are mentally retarded. In June 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, banning all executions of killers with mental retardation, or IQs of 70 or below. "I thought the Supreme Court was absolutely correct in that decision,'' Strickland said. "I don't believe that a person who is mentally retarded, a person who has a documented,
serious mental illness should be subject to this penalty. I think there are those circumstances where it is inappropriate."

A killer and a victim

On Mansfield Correctional Institution's death row, Cedric Carter remembers when Ted Strickland was a prison psychologist.

"I met him once down in Lucasville," said the West End native and convicted killer. (Strickland said he doesn't remember any particular death row inmates.)

"He came to introduce himself once," Carter said. "He stopped in each of our cells. I shook his hand. I doubt he'd remember me. I know he don't."

Now he hopes Strickland will spare his life. He insists he's retarded, that his lawyers were incompetent. And he wants to live so he can meet his grandchild. He said he is "trying to stay strong."

"I don't think that everybody should be sentenced to death simply because they made a mistake in life," Carter said.

Death penalty opponents like Sister Gerdeman say they're encouraged by Strickland's actions so far.

"We're hopeful because he does seem to be taking this matter very, very seriously ... Our hope is that a complete study would be made of the execution system here in Ohio to reveal the many problems that are there,which at least seem obvious to us,'' she said.

As Mark Godsey, director of the University of Cincinnati-based Ohio Innocence Project put it: "The death penalty is like no other punishment-- it's irreversible."

"If you're going to have it, you need to be extra sure the people on death row deserve it."

To the families of victims, however, too much of the debate over the death penalty is about the death row inmates.

It's victims' families that are punished by repeated delays, said
Barbara Raines, a 51-year-old Lower Price Hill woman whose 10-year-old son Aaron was kidnapped and killed in 1992.

Today, Aaron would be 25, but the 2 men sentenced to death in the crime, Michael Bies and Darryl Gumm, are still alive.

Gumm, 40, has been deemed by the courts to be mentally retarded and therefore cannot be executed. Prosecutors are appealing that ruling.
Bies is making a similar claim that is pending.

"I don't believe in such a long waiting period," Raines said, noting appeals often go on for almost two decades. "It should be time for the executions.

"There's a lot of people doing murder," she said. "They know they'll just go to prison and sit around 20 to 25 years."

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