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  • No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States
  • Staughton Lynd
No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States. By Andrew Welsh-Huggins. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009, 222 pp. Cloth $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8214-1833-8; paper $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8214-1834-5.)

No Winners Here Tonight reviews the history of the death penalty in Ohio from the 1790s to early 2008. The author shows that Ohio has changed its death penalty statutes many times. His thesis is that despite this “tinkering with the machinery of death” (the words are Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun’s), the incidence of capital punishment in Ohio remains arbitrary: Whether or not a murderer is sentenced to death varies with the race of the victim, the state of the budget in the county where the murder was committed, and the practice of prosecutors in that county with respect to plea bargains. Thus, during the first twenty years of experience with Ohio’s current death penalty law, 43 percent of all capital indictments in Hamilton County resulted in death sentences, whereas in Cuyahoga and Franklin counties the comparable numbers were 8 and 5 percent.

Another principal finding is that for 150 years before the present spate of executions, the Ohio legislature over and over again came within a hair’s breadth of abolishing the death penalty and joining states such as Michigan and Wisconsin that did away with the practice before the Civil War. As this review is being written, Ohio is executing one prisoner every month and is the northern state where executions most often occur.

Welsh-Huggins, a professional journalist, is painstaking in his efforts to remain objective. Nonetheless, there is a poignancy to his chapter on clemency that appears to betray a concern that mercy should be exercised in cases where one defendant is sentenced to death and a co-defendant, at least equally culpable, escapes that fate. A very recent example of such a case is that of Jason Getsy, whom the governor declined to spare despite the fact that the Adult Parole Authority had recommended clemency by a 5–2 vote. Getsy’s execution reinforces Welsh-Huggins’s conclusion that the use of clemency as a tool of mercy in capital punishment cases has all but disappeared in Ohio (133). [End Page 143]

A prediction, with which it appears that the author may sympathize, is that defendants found to be guilty of aggravated murder may in the future more often be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Lifetime imprisonment without possibility of parole is favored by Sister Helen Prejean and the Catholic Church. However, many death-sentenced prisoners state that they would rather be put to death than endure the rest of their lives behind bars without hope of release.

There are two aspects of recent capital sentencing in Ohio that this book, surprisingly, does not discuss. The first is the eleven-day uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville in April 1993. Ten persons were murdered during the disturbance, and five prisoners alleged to have been leaders or spokespersons were subsequently sentenced to death. Approximately 26,000 persons in southern Ohio signed a petition demanding that the present statute of the death penalty in the State of Ohio be applied to the Lucasville defendants. Signed petitions were to be returned to Death Penalty, Box 1761, Portsmouth, Ohio.

Second, in September 2007—well before publication of No Winners Here Tonight—a committee of the American Bar Association published an analysis of Ohio’s death penalty laws, procedures, and practices. The ABA committee confirmed Welsh-Huggins’s argument about arbitrariness, finding that those who kill whites are 3.8 times more likely to receive a death sentence than those who kill blacks and that chances of a death sentence in Hamilton County are much higher than elsewhere in the state. The ABA committee criticized the fact that Ohio denies petitioners access to the discovery procedures necessary to develop postconviction claims and recommended requiring the preservation of biological evidence for as...

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