Mike DeWine spent decades as a prosecutor, senator, attorney general, and governor of Ohio. He also co-wrote the 1981 bill that put the death penalty back on the books in his state. On Tuesday, he stood up and said the whole thing needs to go. The man who built the machine is now asking someone to please turn it off.
45 Years and a Full 180
Here's the timeline. In 1978, Ohio's reinstated death penalty law got struck down. DeWine, then a fresh-faced state senator, got to work. He co-wrote the replacement bill in 1981, the one that survived court challenges and has been sending people to death row ever since. That law is still on the books today.
On Tuesday, the 79-year-old governor looked back at all of that and said, according to The Guardian, 'The moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.' He also said he no longer believes it deters murder. Not a hedge. Not a 'we need to study this further.' A flat-out reversal.
This is a man who has been a prosecutor, a U.S. congressman, a U.S. senator, Ohio's attorney general, lieutenant governor, and now governor. He has seen the criminal justice system from basically every seat in the building. When someone with that resume says the death penalty can't be morally justified, that's not a talking point. That's a confession.
The Numbers That Made Him Snap
DeWine didn't just philosophize. He brought receipts. According to The Guardian, he pointed out that in Ohio's last 10 executions, the average time between sentencing and the actual execution date was 21 years. Twenty-one years of appeals, legal costs, prison housing, and trauma for victims' families who keep getting dragged back into the worst moment of their lives every time a court date rolls around.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Guardian why that timeline isn't something you can fix by just speeding up the process. 'When we take the time to thoughtfully review these cases, as we should, we find errors. And that takes time, and a lot of money.' The implication being: rush it, and you will kill innocent people. Take your time, and the whole premise of the punishment collapses.
DeWine also raised the stories of murder victims' families who said they felt re-victimized by the grinding, decades-long legal process, and of corrections staff who carry the psychological weight of actually carrying out executions. Ohio has had its share of nightmares on that front. In 2014, the lethal injection of Dennis McGuire used an untested drug cocktail and, by witness accounts, was a prolonged disaster. Ohio's last execution was in 2018, the year DeWine was elected. He's kept a de facto moratorium ever since.
What He's Asking For and Who's Blocking It
DeWine called on state lawmakers to pass one of the bipartisan repeal bills currently sitting in both chambers of the Ohio legislature. The Guardian reports that those bills exist, they have bipartisan support, and Republican legislative leaders have refused to call them to a vote. Just left them sitting there.
So DeWine went a step further. He reminded everyone that Ohio allows citizens to initiate ballot measures to amend the state constitution. Translation: if the legislature won't act, voters can go around them. That's not a subtle threat. That's a man who knows exactly how much time he has left in office and has decided to use it.
DeWine is term-limited and leaves in January. His office declined to say whether he would commute the sentences of the 114 people currently on Ohio's death row before he goes. That's a question someone needs to keep asking, loudly, every single week until he answers it.
Where This Puts Him in His Own Party
To state the obvious: this is not where the national Republican Party is right now. Donald Trump spent much of his second term pushing to expand the federal death penalty, not roll it back. DeWine's position puts him directly at odds with the dominant energy in his own party on this issue.
But Kevin Werner, executive director of Ohioans to Stop Executions, told The Guardian that DeWine's credibility within Ohio's Republican circles is exactly what makes this matter. 'Every year that we've had a repeal bill, we've gotten more and more conservatives who have come out and said, I agree, the system doesn't work,' Werner said. DeWine has earned a reputation as a serious, careful institutionalist, which in the current moment makes him something of a unicorn.
That reputation is the whole ballgame here. This isn't a progressive activist calling for abolition. This is the guy who wrote the law, watched it operate for four decades from every vantage point the system offers, and concluded it cannot be defended. That argument is considerably harder to dismiss.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what's actually happening here. A Republican governor who helped build Ohio's death penalty apparatus from scratch has spent eight years quietly not executing anyone, then walked out and said the quiet part loud. He didn't do it because it was politically safe. He did it because he apparently looked at 45 years of evidence and decided he owed people the truth before he left. Whatever you think of DeWine's broader record, that takes something that has become genuinely rare in American political life: the willingness to say you were wrong about a thing that cost people their lives.
The Republican-controlled legislature sitting on bipartisan repeal bills and refusing to call them to a vote is the more revealing story here. These are people who, in theory, care about government overreach, fiscal waste, and not killing innocent people by accident. The death penalty scores badly on all three counts by any honest accounting. But the politics of looking soft on crime still terrifies too many of them into paralysis, so the bills collect dust while 114 people sit on death row in a system their own governor just said can't be morally justified.
DeWine has until January. He has the power to commute those sentences before he walks out the door. The question of whether he'll use it is the only question that matters right now, and the fact that his office is declining to answer it is not a great sign. Calling for abolition is the right move. Leaving 114 people in legal limbo while you wait for a legislature that has already told you to get lost would be the wrong one.
