By Ben Dickinson, Back Page Editor 

This week, a lot of innocent people have died. Some have fallen victim to the consummate power of Hurricane Helene and Milton to the relentless incursion of bombing of citizens in Gaza and Lebanon, some crossing the ocean while seeking asylum, some from car accidents, some from cancer, some perhaps from natural causes. 

But today, I want to focus on the deaths of five people in particular whose names are worth saying: Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams, Robert Roberson, Kenneth Smith, Emmanuel Littlejohn and Alan Eugene Miller. The common denominator separating their deaths from the rest: they were all executed or will be executed from taxpayer funding in states that brought a capital punishment case against them.

As a Catholic person, I believe that the death penalty is a violation of natural law and a direct contradiction to Catholic social teaching. But much more than the act of execution itself demeaning the sanctity of life, the capital punishment system steals funding that could be used to protect what I believe to be equally sacred: the lives of those experiencing poverty, war, lack of access to basic necessities and marginalization. 

The 2023 Capital Crimes Report for Ohio, issued by the office of Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, concurs with the notion that capital punishment funding is killing not only people, but a large part of our state’s budget as well. 

The report estimates that the cost per case of each individual experiencing incarceration on death row falls between $1 million and $3 million. If we multiply this range to scale — meaning we estimate the spending for carrying out the execution of all 114 people currently experiencing incarceration on Ohio’s death row — we can expect to spend between $114 million and $342 million carrying out capital punishment.

 The Health Policy Institute of Ohio estimates that it costs $30,558 a year to house the average incarcerated individual in Ohio. The most recent data on the average length of a life sentence in Ohio, which was published by the Ohio state government in 2016, holds that the average individual serving a life sentence spent 26.81 years in prison before death. Based on this data, the cost of life imprisonment for the 114 individuals currently experiencing incarceration on Ohio’s death row is about $92 million. Based on the estimated difference in spending on capital cases against life sentences, one could conclude commuting the sentences of the individuals currently experiencing death row to life sentences would save our state tens of millions of dollars. 

So much good could be done with those extra tens of millions. For example, the state would have a cushion to fund the program to make school lunch and breakfast free for all students who qualify for reduced-cost lunch during fiscal years 2024 and 2025. In June of 2023, the Ohio House passed spending $4.2 million over the next two fiscal years to provide free lunches. This attempt to effectively serve one of the marginalized groups I mentioned earlier was later completely axed by the Ohio Senate. 

One of the factors driving up the price of execution is the ever more elusive access to lethal injection drugs. Since 2011, Ohio has experimented with the use of three different drugs in executions: sodium thiopental, pentobarbital and midazolam. Ohio’s last execution took place in 2018 before the excruciating death of Robert van Hook using midazolam prompted Federal Magistrate Judge Michael Merz to postpone the scheduled execution of Warren Heness, a violation of Henness’s eighth amendment right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Ohio was the first state to execute an individual using sodium thiopental, then pentobarbital and then midazolam — which have been proven in autopsies to cause pulmonary edema, occurring when the lungs fill with fluid and create a sensation closely related to waterboarding. Waterboarding is prohibited entirely in the United States and widely acknowledged as a form of torture.

Still, Ohio seems to be on the “cutting edge” of innovating new, more cost-effective forms of execution. House Bill 392 proposes the ability for an individual to choose execution via lethal injection or by nitrogen hypoxia. In the absence of lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia would become the new and only method of execution in the state. Yost himself touted the “widespread commercial availability of nitrogen,” which would be a more cost-effective form of execution for the state. Just one problem: it is illegal to euthanize dogs via nitrogen hypoxia in Ohio. In 2022, Airgas, an industrial distributor of nitrogen, publicly recommended against the use of nitrogen in human death.

Alabama has already executed Kenneth Smith and Alan Eugene Miller via nitrogen hypoxia. Smith experienced “thrashing movements and seizure-like symptoms” and “took deep gasping breaths” for minutes during his execution. He was pronounced dead 30 minutes after the commencement of the execution process. So much for Alabama officials’ claim that Smith would become “unconscious within seconds.” 

In addition to the reality that it is impossible to find a “humane” way to execute someone, our criminal legal system has been proven to put innocent people to death. In fact, since 1976, when states began to reinstate the death penalty after it was federally paused in 1972, there have been exactly 1,600 people executed in the United States. In the same time frame, there have been 192 people exonerated from their death row sentence. Based on this data from the Death Penalty Information Center, this means that for every nine people executed in the United States, one person is declared innocent. Given the innocence of Marcellus Williams, Robert Roberson (who is scheduled to be executed tomorrow), Carlos DeLuna and more, it is unconscionable to assert that our capital punishment system is reliably serving justice.

I realize this piece may not even read as an opinion. There is just that much evidence and basic math mounted against the use of capital punishment in Ohio. Instead of continuing to innovate solutions to a system that cannot be fixed, I implore Ohio lawmakers to pass Senate Bill 101, which will abolish this archaic practice, and the Ohio Adult Parole Authority to commute the sentences of those experiencing incarceration on death row to life sentences.