Likely, you’ve seen a lot of news about Ohio’s capital punishment system of late. At the forefront making most of these waves has been Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. As our state’s chief law enforcement officer and a 2026 Ohio gubernatorial candidate, Yost has been vocal in his support for resuming executions, without regard for the death penalty’s many flaws.
By way of background, Gov. Mike DeWine has placed an unofficial moratorium on executions since he entered office in 2019, citing difficulties in procuring from pharmaceutical companies the lethal injection drugs necessary to carry out Ohio’s lethal injection execution protocol. Specifically, these companies say if their product is used for executions, they will cancel other contracts with the state that provide medication the state needs for the Medicaid program, the health needs of inmates in our state prisons, and so on.
Given that current Ohio law does not authorize any other methods of execution, DeWine accordingly has reprieved executions since his term began and does not plan on carrying out any in the remainder of his term.
Troublingly, recently introduced House Bill (HB) 36 would authorize nitrogen gas suffocation as an execution method. Yost supports this legislation, as he did in the previous General Assembly.
Meanwhile, at the federal level, the Trump administration has issued an executive order directing the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to help states procure lethal injection drugs where necessary. In response, Yost has written a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi offering to work with her team at the DOJ “on all lawful and necessary actions to ensure that a sufficient supply of drugs is made available as soon as possible.”
Most recently, Yost released the Capital Crimes Report, which the state Attorney General is required by law to issue annually. In this report and a recent Cleveland.com opinion piece, a number of harmful claims about innocence have been recklessly thrown around, particularly with respect to the 11 Ohioans who have been exonerated from death row.
Included in the op-ed is a baseless claim, that "no innocent person has been executed in modern times.” How does he know that with absolute certainty? Has his office reviewed every execution conducted in Ohio, not to mention nationwide? When did “modern times” start, exactly?
The stories of Ohio’s 11 death row exonerees (and the at least 200 exonerees nationwide) suggest it’s very possible the state unknowingly has executed an innocent person in the past, which should horrify all of us.
On that note, let’s talk about our exonerees. Yost claims in the recently released Capital Crimes Report that only one of the 11 “was removed from Death Row for reasons that can be fairly attributed to his actual innocence.” This callous claim totally discounts the stories of exonerees like Kwame Ajamu, Derrick Jamison, and Joe D’Ambrosio, just to name a few.
Theirs are stories of people who spent time behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit because of police and prosecutorial misconduct, exculpatory evidence that was withheld, and false witness testimony. These are not instances of how “guilty people sometimes beat the rap,” as Yost suggests in the report. To argue that they somehow deserved to be executed is appalling for anyone to say, let alone our state’s chief law enforcement officer.
Beyond casting doubts on exonerees’ innocence, Yost has said multiple times that removals of individuals from death row “show the appeals process working as it should to prevent an injustice.” It is very hard to understand how 11th-hour efforts to free innocent people from death row demonstrate the system “working as it should,” after in some cases the state already has incarcerated them for years and thus upended their lives.
The enormous cost of the death penalty also factors into this conversation—even Yost concedes in his report that it represents “a stunning amount of money to spend on a program that doesn’t achieve its purpose.” We happen to agree here—according to the nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission, whose estimates Yost cites, capital cases may cost $1 million to $3 million more per case than life without parole cases. Applying these estimates to the inmates currently on Death Row, Yost himself points out that these cases may have cost taxpayers anywhere between $116 million and $348 million.
Neither of the alternative proposals Yost is championing – nitrogen gas or hunting down lethal injection drugs - address the real issues he acknowledges are at play. The point is that the deep flaws of the capital punishment system remain with the status quo, and resuming executions would further exacerbate those flaws. In attempting to restart executions by any means necessary, Yost has made his position abundantly clear: he does not care about the risk of executing an innocent person, the enormous cost to the state, the fact that Black people are disproportionately sentenced to death, that geographic disparities also exist in death sentences, and so on.
Beyond that, there is something else really frightening at play here—a single-minded focus on vengeance, supposedly in the name of justice. The 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the use of cruel and unusual punishment. How closely are people like Yost and other decision-makers willing to toe that line?
The ultimate question is whether Ohioans want the state to keep spending this outrageous amount of money on this irreparably broken system, which purports to be about justice but really is about vengeance and retribution via state-sponsored murder.
Polling the ACLU of Ohio released last year shows that fully 56 percent of Ohioans support replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole. It is time for Attorney General Yost and the state legislature to heed that will of the people instead of taking our state further backwards. It’s been nearly 7 years since Ohio’s last state-sponsored execution; let 2018 be the last year on the record books for this shameful act.
