Ohio Death Penalty Executions Starting Up Again in 2017

BY MARIEL PADILLA
Miami University journalism student

When the state of Ohio resumes executions next month, Donald Ketterer will be sixth in line.

Ketterer, 67, is now one of 26 Ohio death row inmates with a scheduled execution date through 2019 -- and the only one from Butler County. Convicted of murdering 85-year-old Lawrence Sanders in 2003, Ketterer’s execution is set for May 17, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

Whether the state will actually meet that deadline is a matter of debate, however.

The Butler County prosecutor’s office, which handled the original case against Ketterer, notes that execution dates are often extended.

Ketterer’s court-appointed public defender, along with a group at the forefront of fighting against the death penalty in Ohio, believes he could be spared on mental health grounds.

As Ohio ends a three-year moratorium on capital punishment, Donald Ketterer sits in a one-man cell awaiting his fate. If his date sticks, he’ll be moved -- from either Chillicothe or Toledo, since the state is in the process of moving death row inmates from the first to the second site -- to what's called the Death House in Lucasville. Barring delays, at 10 a.m. on the third Wednesday in May, he will die by lethal injection.

Ketterer did not respond to requests for comment, sent through a state-run email system.

Ketterer’s case

In the late afternoon on Feb. 24, 2003, Donald Ketterer, then 53, beat and stabbed to death his former employer, Lawrence Sanders.

According to court documents in the case, Ketterer had gone to Sanders’ home in Hamilton, Ohio, to borrow money. When Sanders said he did not have the money, Ketterer struck him in the head with an iron skillet and stabbed him with a pair of scissors and a knife. Then Ketterer robbed Sanders’ home and stole his car.

Ketterer had known Sanders since he was 9 years old. For years, Ketterer helped Sanders shovel snow, do yard work and paint, according to neighbors.

In 2006, clinical psychologist Dr. Bobbie Hopes evaluated and tested Ketterer to determine his competency. She found that he had a personality disorder with antisocial and borderline traits, and an extensive history of suicide attempts and gestures. His family also had a long history of mental illness and suicide attempts.

Hopes testified in State v. Ketterer, that Ketterer developed rheumatic fever and was frequently hospitalized in his first 12 years. His father physically abused him. Ketterer did poorly in school, eventually dropping out of high school.

Ketterer joined the Army in 1979 and was honorably discharged three years later. Two years later, he was sentenced to a three-year prison sentence for armed robbery. For next 20 years, Ketterer worked as a house painter.

Appeals now underway

In the Sanders case, Ketterer pleaded guilty to aggravated murder, aggravated robbery, grand theft of a motor vehicle and burglary. In 2004, a three-judge panel sentenced Ketterer to death.

His case has been in and out of various courts at the state and federal level since then. In 2007, he filed a motion, ultimately unsuccessful, to withdraw his guilty plea. He's also been appealing his original conviction, which is common in death penalty cases.

This summer, on July 22, the Butler County Common Pleas Court denied Ketterer's appeal, originally sought in 2002. The court denied the appeal again on Nov. 15.

In between, on Sept. 1, the Ohio Supreme Court granted Ketterer's "motion to stay"-- essentially suspending his execution -- "until he has exhausted his post-conviction remedies."

Lina Alkamhawi, an assistant Butler County prosecutor, believes Ketterer will eventually be executed. “Based on the Supreme Court of Ohio’s three prior decisions affirming Donald Ketterer’s convictions and death sentence, I expect his convictions and sentence will be upheld,” she said.

But she is not at all certain he will face the death penalty in six months time.

"From experience, I know of a case that was shelved for more than a decade," she said. "I am uncertain as to why a date is set knowing that the execution is not likely to occur."

The three-year hiatus

In January 2014, Ohio executed Dennis McGuire with an experimental two-drug combination.

Prior to McGuire’s execution, Ohio ran out of supplies for lethal injections. Like other states, Ohio then sought to import chemicals from European companies. However, most pharmaceutical manufacturers deemed their drugs off-limits for capital punishment purposes.

Because of this shortage, the state tried, for the first and only time, to use two drugs commonly found in hospitals: midazolam and hydromorphone.

It took McGuire 26 minutes to die after the drugs were administered. Witnesses say McGuire struggled against his restraints, gasped, choked and clenched his fists.

McGuire's execution was the longest in Ohio’s recent history. A moratorium on executions followed immediately.

In late 2014, state lawmakers passed a law that encouraged local, compounding pharmacies to make lethal-injection drugs for the state of Ohio. However, none were willing.

Then, Ohio’s prison agency attempted to buy drugs from overseas only to be waylaid by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as sodium thiopental is not an FDA-approved drug for executions.

Now, three years after its last execution, Ohio plans to resume capital punishment with a new three-drug combination — midazolam, rocuronium and potassium chloride — that requires the state to adopt a new execution protocol.

Rocuronium bromide, a paralytic agent, has never been used to carry out the death penalty in Ohio. Midazolam and potassium chloride, however, have been used in a particularly gruesome Oklahoma execution, in which the inmate died from a heart attack 40 minutes after receiving the drug mix.

The first test of the new protocol could come Jan. 12 when Ronald Phillips is scheduled for execution. He filed a suit in federal court in October, claiming the state would violate his constitutional rights to avoid "cruel and unusual punishment” in using the new three-drug regimen.

Prison life
As of June of this year, Ohio had 137 death row inmates. There are only six other states that have more people on death row: California, Florida, Texas, Alabama, Pennsylvania and North Carolina in that order.

There have been 156 inmates exonerated in the United States since 1973, which is approximately five per year. Exonerated prisoners are considered innocent and wrongfully convicted.

Ohio has exonerated nine death row inmates. One of these men, Joe D’Ambrosio, was held prisoner for 22 years.

“Prison was monotonous. It was like Pavlov’s dog. Ring a bell, time to eat. Ring a bell, time to stop. It was day after day after day of the same thing over and over again. You’ve got 10 minutes to eat, then shower time, then recreation time, over and over again,” D’Ambrosio said in a phone interview from his home in the Cleveland area.

Accused of murdering an adolescent boy, D’Ambrosio also spent a large portion of his time learning the law so that he could get himself a re-trial.

Now D’Ambrosio is working for the priest who helped free him. As a jack of all trades, he does odd jobs and maintenance tasks at a Catholic parish. His story was featured as on CNN’s "Death Row Stories," which is available on Netflix.

Another death row survivor, Kwame Ajamu, can relate to the monotony of prison life. “ I would get up, do my workout — I did a lot of boxing — and then I would go to work, which consisted of going to school at the education department from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Then we would come in because everything closed. Then I would read or play games in the gym because that’s all we had.”

Ajamu was incarcerated when he was 17 in 1975 and wasn’t freed and dismissed of all charges until he was almost 45. He was arrested with his brother and best friend on allegations that he murdered a salesman in Cleveland.

A key witness recanted his testimony decades after the conviction, resulting in the eventual exoneration of the three death row inmates. Ajamu’s best friend became the longest-held prisoner to be cleared of his crime in U.S. history, serving 39 years in prison.

'Grim, despicable place'

“Prison is a remote, grim and despicable place in terms of having emotional gatherings. It’s almost impossible to make close connection. It was sad and mostly lonely. At one point, I was living among 3,600 people, but I had no one that I could relate to, that I could talk to,” Ajamu said by phone from his Cleveland home.

Ajamu is an active board member of The Witness to Innocence, an organization run by former death row exonerees. He also works closely with Ohioans to Stop Executions (OTSE).

D’Ambrosio said he eventually got used to living with an execution date because the date got pushed back repeatedly during the appeals process. His first date was exactly two years after the murder he was accused of, so that the victim and his alleged perpetrator would die on the same date, he said.

Freed in 2012, D'Ambrosio is still astonished at how events played out.

“When you’re exonerated, all they do is open the door and kick you out,” D’Ambrosio says. “There’s no program for an exoneree in the United States. They hope that you mess up again, sending you out into the world with nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Mental health reform
Over the years, physicians and psychologists diagnosed Donald Ketterer as suffering from alcohol dependency, polysubstance dependency, chronic depression, major depressive disorders and bipolar disorder, according to the 2006 report from the Common Pleas Court of Butler County. At the time of his crime, he was impaired by a "crack-cocaine binge," according to his appeal.

In 2003, Ketterer’s brother Tom said Donald was “addicted to cocaine, abused alcohol and suffered from bipolar disorder. He was never really violent though—I’ve never seen him in a fight with anyone,” according to an article published in The Cincinnati Enquirer.

His appeal also characterized him as illiterate with "intelligence that falls in the intellectually disability range."

Over the past 30 years, the number of people on death row with mental illness and other disabilities has steadily increased, according to the National Mental Health Association.

“I believe that the time has come to reexamine whether we, as a society, should administer the death penalty to a person with a serious mental illness,” former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton wrote in a 2006 filing related to Ketterer's case.

At least some members of the Ohio Legislature are asking the same question.

Bill moves forward

In May of 2015, Sens. Bill Seitz and Sandra R. Williams put forth a bill calling for a ban on executions of inmates proven to be mentally ill at the time of their crime. The Ohio Senate Criminal Justice Committee passed SB162, on a 9-1 vote, in November. It's unknown whether the measure, if enacted, would apply retroactively, said Abe Bonowitz, head of communications for OTSE.

But Ketterer’s mental health -- and the court record establishing his early history with mental health struggles -- will be pivotal in the months ahead.

"Mental health issues are going to be a big part of the conversation around Ketterer’s case,” said his state-appointed public defender Randall Porter.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the American Bar Association have all endorsed resolutions calling for the severely mentally ill to be exempted from the death penalty.

Porter, meanwhile, is working on his appeal, which he believes could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court. That process can take as long as seven years, he said.

Looking forward
Executions across the country are in decline, according to the DPIC. The year 2015 -- with 28 executions -- marked the lowest number in 25 years. The number sits at 20 for 2016, down from a high of 98 in 1999. Thirty-one states still practice the death penalty, DPIC data shows.

States are moving away from the death penalty because it is costly and problematic. Among the biggest problems: it is applied unevenly and sometimes incorrectly, with race, geography and economic issues at play. Finding drugs for lethal injection is among the most recent complications.

And Americans increasingly favor life without parole to death penalty, polls show.

“The only reason they had the death penalty before was to make society safe, and that was the only way to keep you out of the system. It’s cheaper to put someone in jail for the rest of their life than to execute them because of mandatory appeals,” D’Ambrosio said.

Photo: Sixty-seven-year-old Donald Ketterer is the only Butler County resident on death row with a scheduled execution date. -- Photo from Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction