Paint it Forward: Toledo event combines art, activism
Ohioans to Stop Executions helped organize a unique event in Toledo, turning a forgotten garage into the newest site of a beautification project.
“Joy is the best type of protest,” the organizer of the event, Lydia Myrick, 22, a recent graduate from the University of Toledo, said of the 2024 Paint it Forward Festival and Reflections of Peace Exhibition.
Officially the gathering at the intersection of Pinewood Avenue and North Miller Street was activism “against the death penalty and gun violence,”
Time for Ohio to abolish the death penalty
Since the death penalty was enacted in Ohio in 1981, there have been 341 death sentences. Of those, 56 inmates have been executed, 119 remain on death row, and 11 inmates were exonerated. (The others either died of natural causes or had their sentences commuted to another penalty for various reasons.) According to the Ohio Innocence Project, more than 50% of Ohio’s death row is comprised of Black men even though Black people make up only 14% of our population. Ohio’s population is more than 80% white, but only 40% of death row inmates are white. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, more than 75% of perpetrators were sentenced to death in cases where the victims were white, even though nationally only 50% of murder victims are white. The cost to Ohio taxpayers in death sentence cases is $1 to $3 million more per case as opposed to life in prison cases according to the Attorney General’s office due to the ongoing appeals and court costs involved.
Ohio considers 2 new death penalty bills that would either end executions or restart them
One of those bills would allow executions to resume, the other would abolish them. The first bill would change the method of execution from lethal injection to gas. Currently, the state has halted executions because they can’t secure the drugs used in lethal injections. If the bill passes, executions could then resume.
The other bill would replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Unfit for a Dog: A ‘Textbook’ Case of the Unacceptability of Nitrogen Suffocation Executions
Before Alabama put Kenneth Smith to death by nitrogen suffocation on January 25, state prosecutors assured the courts that he would be unconscious in seconds on his way to a peaceful passing. It was the same false promise execution proponents had previously made when states introduced the electric chair and lethal injection as new and improved humane methods of execution.
Instead, eyewitnesses — including family members of Elizabeth Sennett, whom Smith was convicted of killing — reported that Mr. Smith “convulsed,” “writhed,” and “shook” “violently” for more than two minutes after being administered the lethal gas and, struggling against the restraints that bound him to the gurney, “gasped” with his chest “heaving” for at least five more minutes before his breathing slowed and he lost consciousness about nine minutes into a 22-minute execution.
The racist roots of Ohio’s death penalty
The Death Penalty Information Center released a new report about Ohio’s death penalty. The report – Broken Promises: How a History of Racial Violence and Bias Shaped Ohio’s Death Penalty – traces the racist roots of our state’s capital punishment system.
Death Penalty States Beware: Nitrogen Hypoxia Is Not the Solution to America’s Long History of Inhumane Executions
Columnist and law professor Austin Sarat warns states like Ohio that executions using nitrogen gas do not solve the myriad problems with the death penalty.