Ex-Ohio reps rally to abolish the death penalty, including Portage County’s

In 1981, former Ohio State Reps. John Begala and Pete Crossland were among the minority who voted against the death penalty. Now, engineers of the law are calling for its abolition.

Crossland and Begala represented Summit and Portage counties, respectively, when Ohio reenacted the death penalty 44 years ago. In October, they joined 27 former Ohio lawmakers who signed a letter backing Senate Bill 133, which, if passed, would abolish the state’s death penalty. 

The proposed legislation has gained bipartisan support from officials concerned with the death penalty’s cost, inequities and what the letter called “irrevocable” consequences. For some, the moment marks a notable shift in perspective among former proponents of capital punishment. For those like Begala, it’s a moment of unison against what he has long believed to be a “barbaric” practice.

“I think the main thing that is changing people’s minds is the fact that all of the hair-splitting that goes on to justify the death penalty is really not born out,” Begala said. 

Proponents of the death penalty often cite it as a necessary deterrent to crime. However, studies have found no meaningful evidence to prove that claim, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. 

Crossland agreed that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are paying more attention to long-held concerns about capital punishment – from its impact on crime, or lack thereof, to the financial toll on taxpayers. 

The estimated extra cost of imposing the death penalty on Ohio’s current death-row prisoners ranges between $116 million and $348 million, according to the state’s most recent annual report on capital crimes.

“I think people are more aware of the cost of execution,” Crossland said. “People who didn’t know much about it would say, ‘Well, execute someone and that takes care of it. If you had to give them life and imprisonment, then you would have years of the state feeding and housing (them).’”

Some lawmakers have also begun to question how factors like economic class and race might create inequities within the death penalty system. 

“Poor people and minorities were not having the means to defend themselves … and that has persisted with me, along with what I think is a proper Christian and cultural value of human life,” Crossland said. 

Ohio has a back-and-forth history with the death penalty. In 1978, the state Supreme Court ruled that the policy was unconstitutional. However, lawmakers voted to reinstate the death penalty in 1981, following years of debate. 

Since then, at least 342 people in the state have received death sentences, and 56 were executed, according to the 2024 attorney general report. There were 118 active death penalty cases for 116 people throughout the state at the time of the report. 

Ohio, however, hasn’t executed anyone on death row since 2018, under what Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called an “unofficial moratorium” on capital punishment. Some pharmaceutical companies have refused to supply state prisons with lethal injection drugs, rendering executions “impossible from a practical point of view,” DeWine told the Associated Press in 2020. 

Lethal injection is the only legal method of execution under Ohio law. Earlier this year, however, Republican House members introduced a bill that would allow execution by nitrogen hypoxia. The process would require death-row prisoners to inhale nitrogen gas until their bodies lacked the oxygen they need to survive. 

DeWine’s office has no new comments on the matter, a spokesperson said. Meanwhile, the governor continues to delay executions and announced reprieves for two death row inmates, including James Trimble, as recently as Oct. 10. Trimble, who was found guilty of three murders in Portage County in 2005, has a new execution date of March 14, 2029.

Those delays, along with the drug shortage and procedural changes to appeals, have essentially “paralyzed” Ohio’s death penalty system, Attorney General David Yost wrote in the state’s 2024 report. 

“If we were starting from scratch to design a system for the ultimate punishment — whether that punishment is execution or, instead, life in prison without parole — neither death-penalty opponents nor death-penalty supporters would create anything like Ohio’s current system, which produces churn, waste and endless lawsuits — and little else,” Yost wrote. 

Those drawn-out legal processes and delays are also painful for people affected by death penalty cases and get to the heart of Begala’s career-long opposition to capital punishment, he said. 

“The communities of people who have been killed have to relive this event again and again and again – sometimes spanning decades,” Begala said. “Why continue that? Why not let justice be swift? Let it be complete. And let society bear the cost of being a nation of people that respects human life and incarcerates people for the balance of their lives?”