Staff report

On Tuesday, Gov. Mike DeWine announced that he would give his position soon on the enforcement of the death penalty in Ohio, which for nearly eight years has not been enforced because of the state’s inability to obtain lethal injection drugs.

“Though the governor says he cannot obtain these drugs, many other states are carrying out court-ordered executions at record levels,” Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins said in a news release.

Watkins provided a look at the death penalty in Ohio and recent action in other states that “provide compelling evidence to maintain the present death penalty law in Ohio, allowing citizen jurors to make these decisions in the worst crimes against humanity.”

“No matter what the governor says about the future of the death penalty, the people of Ohio will have the power to step up and elect a new governor and attorney general and legislature in the November election who will actually determine the future of the death penalty in Ohio along with the voters themselves if this issue would be placed on a statewide ballot,” Watkins said. “This office firmly believes that the present death penalty law should be maintained, used and enforced unless the voters of Ohio say otherwise.

“A cadre of capital punishment opponents in Ohio want to take away the Constitutionally given power of the people of Ohio — who have had it since statehood in 1803 — by repealing the state’s death penalty law, which has been repeatedly upheld as lawful by the Ohio Supreme Court, without having put the issue on the ballot. These opponents want to take away that right even though the executions of monster killers of young children have increased at record levels in the United States by sister states. Ohio IS NOT New York, California or Illinois,” Watkins wrote.

TEXAS CASE

He cited the example of Tanner Horner, a former FedEx driver who was just sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of a 7-year-old girl. According to media coverage of the case, a Fort Worth jury on May 5 decided on capital punishment after hearing a month of testimony and evidence that included audio of the girl’s last moments from inside Horner’s delivery van, from which he was delivering Christmas gifts.

In the one-hour video played to the jury, Horner could be seen lifting the girl into his van and then driving away from her rural home, telling her not to scream. After covering the camera, Horner then asks Athena questions before stopping the van, telling her they are going to “hang out.”

Horner then tells her to take off her shirt and she begins crying asking for her mother and to go home. When she asks “Why are you doing this?” Horner replies, “Because you are pretty.”

The hourlong recording includes the girl’s scream as well as choking and slamming noises. At one point, Horner tells her: “If you don’t shut up, I will hurt you worse.”

A medical examiner testified at his trial that the victim died of blunt force injuries with smothering and strangulation. All the defense Horner’s attorney could give and strongly argue during mitigation was telling jurors that Horner’s mother drank while she was pregnant, that he has autism and suffered from “various mental illnesses throughout his life” including being exposed to a “massive amount of lead.”

“These kinds of defenses are still being litigated in Trumbull County today, with convicted child murderer Danny Lee Hill, who was videotaped telling authorities about his participation in the torturous killing of a child (Raymond Fife),” Watkins wrote.

DEATH ROW INMATES

On death row in Ohio are child killers Danny Lee Hill, Stanley Adams, James Trimble and George Brinkman, all from northeastern Ohio:

• Hill participated in the beating death and rape torture of 12-year-old Raymond Fife as he was on his way to a Boy Scout meeting in Warren in 1985.

• Adams beat and stabbed 43-year-old Esther Cook and then beat, raped and strangled her 12-year-old daughter, Ashley Cook, before posing her nude body on Oct. 11, 1999, also in Warren. Adams is also linked to the August 1999 murder of 40-year-old Roslyn Taylor, whose body was found in a burned car.

• In 2005, Trimble shot and killed his girlfriend, Renee Bauer and her 7-year-old son, Dakota at their home in Brimfield Township, Portage County. Trimble fled the scene on foot. Later that evening, he broke into the nearby residence of Sarah Positano, a 22-year-old college student, and took her hostage. After a police SWAT team surrounded the residence, Trimble shot and killed Positano and exchanged gunfire with the SWAT team before being captured and arrested.

• In a 2017 killing spree, Brinkman’s first victims were Suzanne Taylor, with whom he had been friends since elementary school, and her two daughters, 21-year-old Taylor Pifer and 18-year-old Kylie Pifer. Brinkmen took the women captive inside their North Royalton home in Cuyahoga County. He killed Suzanne in front of her daughters and then killed the young women. Brinkman then went to the Lake Township home of an elderly couple, Rogell and Roberta John, people he had known for over a decade. He shot them both to death. Brinkman even got two trials and was sentenced to death twice.

WATKINS’ VIEW

Watkins, the longest serving elected Democratic prosecuting attorney from Trumbull County, stated in his release the overwhelming majority from both political parties in the county support the executions of Danny Lee Hill and Stanley Adams as they did when the state of Ohio carried out the executions of three other Trumbull County killers in 2009 and 2010.

On May 7, Attorney General Dave Yost, long a proponent of the death penalty, announced his intentions to resign effective June 7. Before appointing Andy Wilson as Yost’s replacement, DeWine had considered a variety of candidates to succeed Yost, including state Auditor Keith Faber, the Republican candidate for attorney general.

Faber also has been a proponent for the enforcement of the death penalty law in Ohio and has said it’s time to consider a method other than lethal injection.

“The Democratic candidate for attorney general in the 2026 election, John Kulewicz, has not specifically taken a position on repealing Ohio’s nearly 225-year-old Constitutionally based law allowing juries to consider the death penalty as a just sentence. It is, therefore, necessary for all candidates from both parties seeking to become Ohio’s next governor and attorney general to state their positions on this important issue to the voters,” Watkins wrote.

Watkins has testified before Ohio legislative panels promoting the introduction of nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution and defending Ohio’s death penalty law. In response to the lack of execution drugs available, Watkins has written state and federal officials urging them to get executions restarted in Ohio, even if it means going back to the electric chair or bringing in new methods, including firing squads.

Watkins is clear that he doesn’t want to see Ohio go the other way. He believes that once Ohio takes the death penalty off the books, then the “repealers” will want to eliminate life sentences for murderers and child rapists.

“Victims such as Miriam Fife and family members of Esther and Ashley Cook deserve justice after all these decades of suffering. However, a few members of both parties are now trying to ‘transition’ Ohio into an anti-death penalty state without a vote of the people. That is reprehensible and must be stopped. Let the candidates this fall debate the issue and let the voters decide,” Watkins said.