By Alan Johnson, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost just couldn’t resist jumping on board a new way to kill people – or the opportunity to be in front of television cameras.
Yost, Ohio’s two-term Republican attorney general, on Tuesday announced his support for legislation to allow nitrogen hypoxia to be used in Ohio executions. The bill is sponsored by state Reps. Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, and Phil Plummer, R-Dayton.
Yost said Ohio has “broke faith” with crime victims and jurors by not carrying out death sentences for the last five years while capital punishment remains law. Without mentioning Gov. Mike DeWine by name, Yost said not following the law is “an abdication of the sovereignty of the state of Ohio.”
The proposal, which has 13 cosponsors, would allow condemned inmates to choose between execution by lethal drugs or nitrogen hypoxia. However, nitrogen hypoxia would be used if lethal injection drugs are unavailable, which has been the case for the past five years.
Yost, who desperately wants to be Ohio’s next governor, is woefully misguided in pushing Ohio to follow suit with Alabama by adopting nitrogen hypoxia for capital punishment.
His push at this point is untimely, unseemly, and unnecessary. It is an exercise in personal and political vanity at a time when Ohioans are less interested in executions. Bipartisan legislation to end capital punishment is pending before the General Assembly.
Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith on Jan. 27, using nitrogen gas for the first time in U.S. history. Officials called it a “textbook” execution but media eyewitnesses described a quite different scene as Smith shook violently and thrashed on the gurney after the gas began flowing. He gasped for breath for several minutes and appeared to be dry-heaving into the mask covering his face.
The execution of Dennis McGuire on Jan. 16, 2014, was one of the last executions I witnessed as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. Like the execution of Smith, McGuire’s death by lethal injection was a nightmare. He gasped, choked, struggled, and writhed on the execution table for 12 minutes before, mercifully, it was over. It was by far the most gruesome of 21 executions I witnessed.
In the process used on Smith, nitrogen — and no oxygen — is pumped into an airtight mask worn by the condemned. The result is suffocation. It is so dangerous that a spiritual adviser in the execution chamber had to sign a waiver of liability in case the gas leaked.
Ohio hasn’t had an execution since 2018. Gov. DeWine, also a Republican, has repeatedly delayed scheduled executions, citing the lack of availability of lethal injection drugs. It is certain there will be no executions here until the end of his term in 2026.
So why is Yost weighing in at this point?
He tipped his hand last year when he used the Capital Crimes Report issued annually by the attorney general as a bully pulpit to express his desire to resume executions which he said have been stalled far too long. He waved the report at Tuesday’s press conference.
Now he’s in a head-to-head battle with Lt. Gov. Jon Husted as prime competitors for governor in two years. Husted has been rolling out press releases on a variety of topics. The common wisdom about the attorney general is the most dangerous place to be is between Yost and a television camera.
I have known Dave Yost, who for a while went by Davyd Yost, for more than 30 years. We were competitors at Columbus City Hall when I worked for the Columbus Dispatch and he reported for the Columbus Citizen-Journal, now defunct.
He was a good journalist, a fair to middling musician, and a fun guy to be around.
But then he got a law license, became a prosecutor, got MAGA-tized, and took a hard turn to the right.
He professes to be a Christian and opposes abortion.
This is where I cannot understand his thinking. If all life is sacred, as abortion opponents contend – and I agree – how can you favor taking the life of someone through execution? Either all life is sacred or it is not. There is no gray area.
Both Yost and Stewart danced around the sanctity of life question at the Statehouse press conference, seeking to contrast an “innocent life and a guilty life.”
Life is life. Imago dei. The image of Christ.
It would be wise (albeit unlikely) for Yost to heed the words of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman, a Republican appointed by Richard Nixon.
In a famous dissent in a 1994 murder case before the Supreme Court, Blackman wrote:
“From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. I feel…obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.”
It’s time to end, not extend the use of capital punishment in Ohio.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Host’s eagerness to adopt nitrogen hypoxia as a means of carrying out a death sentence disgusts me.
Why is he raising this idea? It’s red meat and he is looking at his political future.
Disregarding the capital punishment debate, I am reminded of the FAA rule that supplementary oxygen is required for a pilot to fly above ten thousand feet. The consequence of being above that altitude very long without oxygen is (I am assured) that a pilot gets intoxicated and may fall asleep. It sounds quite benign and if executions must take place, I wonder why simulated high altitude is not used. It must not be as neat and pretty as it sounds. Certainly gassing a convict with nitrogen doesn’t sounds about as appealing as drowning. My objection has to do with its’ finality. Mistakes are made, innocent people are executed, and there may be more to learn, but it’s too late,
Nothing exhibits the confused nature of moral thinking in religious believers more than capital punishment. If you point out to them the obvious inconsistency, that believing abortion is evil and calling themselves pro-life, they will respond that…then come up with numerous reasons why the right to life can be extinguished. It is a morally bankrupt position. People like Dennis Prager patronisingly declare that ‘morality without God is just opinion’. My message to him is ALL morality is just opinion, it’s just that his opinion is heavily influenced by a book he’s determined to pretend he heeds.
The problem is that those who oppose abortion (which they are perfectly entitled to do, within reason) have a gut feeling about the idea of killing what they see as a baby. They’re not appealing to some higher power that says abortion is wrong, they have a gut instinct on the subject. When it comes to capital punishment the same. They have a deep seated hatred of the person on death row that they seek to assuage via revenge, and the nastier the death the better. That’s it. It’s why secular morality is actually superior to religious morality because secular doesn’t pretend to hide its origins.
Personally, I do not believe in the death penalty. Incarcerate people for life if the court deems that their crimes are sufficiently heinous. But killing someone who has been tried and convicted seems wrong. You’d think Christians would do everything in their power to keep someone alive to try to “save their soul from hell”. But somehow, a murderer should just be executed, end of story – and in a particularly gruesome way.
Obstacle–I, too, am against the death penalty. In fact, I have been against it from the moment when I, as a child, learned about it.
I simply cannot understand that anyone who claims to care about anyone’s salvation can be in favor of executions.
The most recent state-sanctioned murder (Let’s call it what it is!) might be unique in one sense. Every new method of execution is claimed to be more humane than the one that preceded it because, ostensibly, it caused less suffering to the condemned inmate. Truth is, every new method is slightly more palatable –and easier to put out of mind–than the old one: It’s less grisly, I imagine, to see someone hung rather than turned into a leonine lunch–or to see someone die more quickly when their head is lopped off than to see them writhe on the gallows. And, of course, executing someone in the electric chair or a gas chamber further secludes the doomed detainee from the rest of society.
This time around, no one involved seems to making any pretense that suffocating someone is more humane than injecting them, or using the other methods I’ve mentioned.
What great comments from you guys. Velovixen, I’m a life long opponent of the death penalty myself. It really about vengeance. It does not deter crime. I was the only student in my criminology class 40 years ago at UGA who was against the death penalty at the start of the quarter.
Our professor was a retired prison warden and he recommended we read a book by the former warden of San Quentin “Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake.”