COLUMBUS —
An Ohio Supreme Court committee studying the state’s capital punishment law on Thursday rejected a recommendation to collect past data to detect racial bias in death penalty cases.
The committee also postponed votes on a recommendation to collect information in the future on all homicides that might be eligible for capital punishment as another way of detecting racial bias. The committee considered but tabled a proposal to analyze existing death penalty data collected by the state public defender’s office.
Those two proposals are likely to pass in the future when the committee gets more details about the recommendations, said James Brogan, a former state appeals court judge who is chairman of the committee.
Brogan said everyone agrees race shouldn’t play a role in the death penalty, but a number of studies nationally have already shown that is the case.
“We don’t know exactly the role in Ohio, although it does appear that in a number of cases, it seems more likely when a black defendant kills a white victim, that they’re more likely to receive the death penalty, than if a black kills a black, which is disconcerting,” Brogan said after the task force’s meeting.
“That indicates that race matters,” he said.
Among precedents cited in the Race and Ethnicity subcommittee recommendations is a 2005 Associated Press study that found that Ohio offenders who killed white victims were more likely to face a death sentence than those whose victims were black.
Numerous other studies of capital punishment laws around the country have also found that death penalty charges are more likely when a victim is white than a minority.
The committee approved a recommendation to require prosecutors, lawyers and judges involved in death penalty cases to be trained to protect against racial bias.
It also approved a recommendation to allow lawyers to seek the removal of judges in cases where there is “a reasonable basis for concluding that the judge’s decision making could be affected by racially discriminatory factors.”
Finally, the committee approved a recommendation requiring that defense attorneys receive training in how best to proceed when they believe a potential juror is removed for possibly discriminatory reasons.
The committee rejected the creation of jury instructions involving race in death penalty cases that would also require jurors to report racial discrimination voiced by other jurors during deliberations.
In 2009, North Carolina enacted its Racial Justice Act, directing judges to reduce a death-row inmate’s sentence to life in prison if they find race was a significant factor in a convicted murderer receiving a death sentence or in the composition of jurors hearing a case.
Lawmakers this month approved a scaled-back version of the law that death penalty supporters say will rely less on statistics they call misleading. They also say it will untie a log jam over the carrying out of executions in North Carolina, where the state last put someone to death in 2006.
Kentucky has a similar law, the nation’s first, but it has never been used in court.
The recommendations the Ohio task force is considering would not create a similar law.
Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor convened the task force while making it clear it won’t debate whether the state should have the death penalty.
The committee of prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and death penalty experts is looking at a variety of issues, from how the law affects minorities to the role of clemency.
The committee is also studying whether Ohio’s death sentences are proportional, meaning that the nature of a crime committed by one condemned inmate is similar to the crimes committed by others.
O’Connor says the committee’s goal is to produce a fair, impartial and balanced analysis of the state’s 30-year-old law.
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Andrew Welsh-Huggins can be reached at http://twitter.com/awhcolumbus.
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Ohio committee looks at racial bias in death penalty cases
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