The 11 executions projected for 2010 contrast with a previous modern-era high of seven in 2004. Ohio resumed executions in 1999 after a 36-year hiatus. There were 15 executions in 1949, but there were no more than six per year from 1950-1963, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
The current spike “is a function of several factors,” said attorney general spokesman Ted Hart. Some cases from the 1980s and early ’90s are finally exhausting their appeals. Officials also are seeing the impact of a 1995 constitutional amendment that streamlined Ohio’s appeals process. And a backlog of cases grew during an unofficial moratorium from May 2007 and October 2008, Hart said.
Ohio’s rise in executions is contrary to national trends, according to the Death Penalty Information Center of Washington, D.C., whose statistics show a per-year decline in executions of almost 50 percent since a high of 98 in 1999. The number of new sentences is dropping at an even greater rate.
Richard Dieter, the center’s executive director, said the numbers are declining because high-profile exonerations have dampened enthusiasm for the death penalty and because many states, including Ohio, have given courts the option of imposing sentences of life without the possibility of parole.
Beuke, of Hamilton County, was the sixth Ohio inmate to be executed using a one-drug protocol created late last year after a series of highly publicized botched executions using a three-drug intravenous cocktail. Ohio was the first state to adopt such a protocol.
Washington state adopted the one-drug protocol earlier this year, but has not yet used it; and there’s a one-drug bill before the California legislature. Tennessee and Florida rejected one-drug plans, Dieter said.
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