Portage County’s prosecutor told DeWine: Enforce the death penalty

Two area county prosecutors, one of them Portage County’s Connie Lewandowski, in August penned a letter to state officials affirming their support for the death penalty.

Ohio reinstated the death penalty in 1981, but has not executed anyone since 2018, Lewandowski and Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins stated in an Aug. 20 letter to Gov. Mike DeWine, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, Ohio Auditor Keith Faber and state Senate and House leaders.

As county prosecutors, Lewandowski and Watkins share the burden of convicted murderers who remain on death row for years, she wrote in an email to The Portager.

“We feel that the jury and the judge did their jobs, and it is time to enforce the law and the obligation to the victims and the community,” she wrote. “I cannot answer why those in charge have not implemented the death penalty.”

In repeated statements accompanying more than 60 execution reprieves — the most recent one dated Oct. 10, 2025 — DeWine cites “ongoing problems involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC), pursuant to DRC protocol, without endangering other Ohioans.”

The Columbus Monthly in 2023 reported that those “other Ohioans” include people in state-funded medical facilities, psychiatric hospitals and prisons.

But Lewandowski and Watkins blamed “obstructionist tactics by special interest groups, political logrolling alliances, pharmaceuticals and others bent on preventing Ohio from carrying out execution orders of judges and juries in death penalty cases.”

Until, or if, voters decide to do away with the death penalty, Lewandowski and Watkins urged Ohio’s top leaders to “let us do our jobs and uphold our oaths of office by bringing finality in death penalty cases.”

It is “ridiculous” that nearly 12 states have resumed executions this year “at a record pace, yet Ohio has had no movement,” the letter stated. “We are as good as Florida, Indiana, Texas and all the other states in 2025 enforcing the law — please end the roadblock!”

Allowing people on death row to continually file for parole repeatedly victimizes those harmed by the incarcerated person’s crime, they wrote, adding that enforcing the death penalty would bring justice to both victims and the community.

The prosecutors singled out many thwarted cases, including that of James Trimble, who was in 2005 convicted of killing three people in Portage County. He remains on death row with a scheduled execution date of March 14, 2029, having received a reprieve and new execution date in October.

Portage County now has two men on death row: Trimble and Tyrone Lee Noling, who was sentenced to death in 1996 of two counts of aggravated murder, two counts of aggravated robbery and one count of aggravated burglary in connection with the 1990 murders of Bernhardt and Cora Hartig, an elderly Atwater couple. 

“Noling & Trimble have exhausted their direct appeals,” Lewandowski wrote in an email to The Portager. “However, all defendants can continue to appeal thereafter, just like all people can litigate lawsuits whether frivolous or not.”

In the letter, the prosecutors called on candidates running for office in 2026 to clearly state their positions on the death penalty and on funding police and prosecutors. 

“Let the voters decide. Better yet, just enforce the law we have on the books now!” they wrote.

Summit County Prosecutor Elliot Kolkovich was not a signatory of the letter, but his office released a statement at The Portager’s request:

“The families of crime victims deserve justice and closure. Death penalty cases already come with a lengthy appeals process, but the politicians in Columbus have dragged it out even further with their inaction. It is my primary duty as a prosecutor to apply and enforce the law—but I also want to limit the continuous re-traumatization of victims’ families and the toll that this issue, and the justice system as a whole, have taken on them,” he wrote.

The death penalty: yes or no?

As of July 2025, Ohio Public Defender Commission statistics indicate that Ohio has 106 people sentenced to death. Eight more are either awaiting retrial or resentencing or their court-ordered reversals are not final. 

Sixty-three are categorized as African American, 46 as Caucasian men, two as Latino/a and three as “other.” One is a Caucasian female.

The commission notes that since 1981, when Ohio instituted the death penalty, the state has executed 56 men, 19 of them African American and 37 Caucasian.

On its website, the ACLU notes that 11 people sentenced to death in Ohio were later declared innocent. Blacks and African-Americans are disproportionately represented on death row, the ACLU states. 

Believing that it violates America’s Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, that it is administered arbitrarily and unfairly, and that it fails to deter crime or improve public safety, the ACLU opposes capital punishment. The organization believes Ohio should join the 23 states and the nation’s capital in cutting ties with the death penalty. 

Three bills in the Ohio statehouse currently address different aspects of death penalty legislation. The ACLU’s website indicates that it supports Senate Bill 133, calls out Senate Bill 134 for “deceptively” tying death penalty repeal to anti-abortion and claims that House Bill 72 buries repeal in anti-medical-aid-in-dying language.

Senate Bill 133 would repeal the death penalty altogether.

Lewandowski said in an email to The Portager that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled the death penalty is not cruel and unusual punishment and that its very severity deters crime. Executed offenders can never commit another crime, she noted.

Also, capital punishment improves public safety by intimidating potential killers and permanently incapacitating society’s most dangerous individuals, she stated. And far from being administered arbitrarily or unfairly, capital punishment focuses on the severity of the crime, not on the defendant’s race, age or gender, she said.

“Justice is blind, and capital punishment reflects society’s judgement on the most serious offenses, not personal characteristics,” she said.

Cases where people were declared innocent after having been sentenced to death prove the criminal justice’s system of checks and balances works as intended, not that it is broken, she added.

“No system created by humans can ever be completely free of error, but the multiple layers of review surrounding the death penalty are specifically designed to catch and correct wrongful convictions, thus ensuring that only the guilty are punished,” she said.