The Legislature “can leave it up to a vote of the people” if it does not want to abolish capital punishment outright, the governor said.
Ohio Governor. Mike DeWine said this week that the state should end the death penalty, with the governor arguing that he no longer believes it is a “deterrent” to murder.
“I believe Ohio should abolish the death penalty,” the Catholic Republican governor said at a June 16 press conference. “The Legislature can take this action, and I believe they should take this action.”
“But if the Legislature does not want to make that decision, they can leave it up to a vote of the people of the state of Ohio,” he said.
After DeWine was elected to the state Senate in 1980, he co-sponsored a bill that sought to reinstate the death penalty in Ohio.
DeWine supported the policy at the time believing it would lessen violent crime, he said at the press conference, but, he argued, “the moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.”
Each decade that the death penalty has been in effect, “the chances of a murderer getting executed get more and more remote,”
