As expected, outgoing Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced his feelings about the death penalty Tuesday.

The two-term governor made it official — he is against capital punishment and wants the state’s General Assembly to abolish the death penalty.

If DeWine’s announcement surprised anyone, it had to be someone who has spent most of the last eight years in a coma or living in a cave. Ohio has not executed a convicted murderer since July 18, 2018, when Robert J. Van Hook was put to death by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, which was known as the state’s death house until DeWine succeeded former Gov. John Kasich.

Once DeWine became governor, he began to delay each execution as the date approached, due to “ongoing problems involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction” — as if lethal injection using drug cocktails was the only method of execution.

So for DeWine’s entire time in office, Ohio has been in a de facto execution moratorium.

That has been great for the 113 inmates on death row in the state, but not so much for the families of their murder victims, like Miriam Fife, whose 12-year-old son Raymond was raped, tortured and murdered by Danny Lee Hill and Timothy Combs in 1985.

Justice delayed has been justice denied for Miriam and her family, who have been waiting for 40 years for Ohio to carry out Hill’s death sentence. Hill — 18 at the time of the atrocities he and his accomplice committed against Raymond — was justly convicted and sentenced to death. Combs, who was a juvenile at the time of the murder on Warren’s West Side, died in prison in 2018.

Interestingly, it was legislation authored by DeWine — then a member of the Ohio Senate — that reinstated the state’s death penalty after a nationwide moratorium. DeWine was the prosecutor in Greene County from 1977-81, before winning election to the state Senate.

What happened to the law-and-order version of DeWine? Ohioans had no reason to suspect that their new governor would execute — no pun intended — such an abrupt about-face upon taking office in 2019.

But that’s exactly what happened. In addition to pushing back every scheduled execution in the state — including Hill’s multiple times — DeWine also hinted that a larger, long-term announcement about capital punishment in Ohio was forthcoming. In December 2025, the governor told reporters he planned to write that statement over the holidays and promised a conversation in January 2026.

It was never a secret that DeWine’s Catholic faith appeared to be a major part of his personal and political lives, but he had long avoided a personal statement about capital punishment until earlier this week.

Now, with the end of his political career fast approaching — and no worries about a backlash from voters — DeWine says he has changed his mind about one of America’s hot-button issues.

“It is impossible today to make the case that the death penalty is a deterrent,” DeWine said. “I no longer believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. … The most effective thing to deal with violent crime is to go after the repeat violent offenders and lock them the hell up, that’s what’s effective.”

DeWine said he once believed that execution was a just punishment for the worst offenders.

“I believed that in some cases capital punishment could serve as a deterrent to keep some people from killing,” he said. “For me, it was the moral justification for having a death penalty. … I’m responsible for that decision.”

One of DeWine’s arguments against the death penalty as a deterrent is the amount of time between sentencing and when executions are finally carried out. Years — sometimes decades — can pass before an inmate is executed.

Look at Hill, who has been in and out of courts since his conviction in 1986. There may be no better example anywhere — certainly not in Ohio — of a case in which the justice system has moved at an excruciatingly slow pace. But if executions happen quickly, then they are a deterrent and it’s OK to put killers to death? That logic doesn’t even make sense.

For Hill, there have been multiple appeals and when those didn’t work, his attorneys began arguing that he shouldn’t be executed because he is or was mentally deficient. You’d be hard pressed to find someone in Trumbull County who will buy that argument.

So what’s next for the Fife family and the loved ones of other victims whose killers remain on death row?

I get it. DeWine had a crisis of conscience and couldn’t bring himself to carry out executions as governor. So now, after finally unloading guilt over his death-penalty legislation from 1981, he will be able to sleep better when he leaves office. And the murderers themselves have been resting easy for eight years while DeWine acted as a one-man capital punishment moratorium.

Does anyone care about how Miriam Fife has been sleeping for more than 40 years? Outside of Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins and others in the area who remember what happened to Raymond, it doesn’t seem like it.

Ed Puskas is editor of the Tribune Chronicle and Vindicator. He can be reached at epuskas@tribtoday.com or by calling 330-841-1786.