"At the Death House Door" Advance Screenings

Ohioans to Stop Executions and the Independent Film Channel

are pleased to announce advance Ohio screenings of the new death penalty documentary, At the Death House Door,

in May 2008.

Come and see two powerful death penalty documentaries in Columbus hosted by Ohioans to Stop Executions and ACLU of Ohio, and Amnesty International and The Kirwan Institute.

Columbus
Saturday, May 17th, 1 pm, FREE

King Avenue United Methodist Church
299 King Avenue (@ Neil Ave)

Limited seating. Contact otse.columbus@gmail.com for more information.

At the Death House Door follows the story of Carroll Pickett, a death row chaplain who counseled 95 inmates to the death chamber, including Carlos De Luna, a man he believes was innocent. Winner of Best Documentary Feature at 2008 Atlanta Film Festival.

Watch the trailer here

Race to Execution explores the disturbing link between race and the death penalty in America, tracing the fates of two death row inmates - Robert Tarver of Alabama and Madison Hobley of Illinois.

Thursday, May 22nd, 7pm, FREE

Landmark Gateway Theatre, 1550 N. High Street
Limited seating. Contact racetoexecutionosu@gmail.com for more information.

More Ohio Showings of

At The Death House Door

Cincinnati
At The Death House Door, the most powerful documentary film of the year presented by Ohioans to Stop Executions and the ACLU of Ohio.

Thursday, May 22nd, 7pm, FREE

Main Street Cinema at the University of Cincinnati
265 Tangeman University Center
2766 UC Main Street

Limited seating. Contact otse.cincinnati@gmail.com for more information.

Toledo
The most powerful documentary of the year, At the Death House Door, is sponsored by OTSE, Toledo Area Ministries, the Catholic Conference of Ohio and the Diocese of Toledo.

Thursday, May 15th, 7pm, FREE

St. John's Jesuit High School and Academy
5901 Airport Highway - Toledo, OH 43615

Limited seating. Contact otse.toledo@gmail.org for more information.

Akron

The most powerful documentary of the year, At the Death House Door, is sponsored by the Sisters of St. Dominic and Ohioans to Stop Executions. The documentary chronicles the work of Rev. Carroll Pickett, who ministered to 95 death row inmates in Huntsville, Texas. The film was awarded winner of the Best Documentary at the 2008 Atlanta Film Festival.

Thursday, May 29th, 7pm, FREE
Our Lady of the Elms High School Theatre

1375 West Exchange Street, Akron, OH 44313

Contact otse.akron@gmail.org for more information or to RSVP for the screening. All are welcome to attend.

For directions, click http://maps.google.com/?mid=1210362245

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Miami Valley: TBA

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Can't make it to a screening? No problem. Tune-in for the network premiere on May 29, 2008 to the Independent Film Channel at 9 PM EST.

Execution Alerts

Currently there are no execution dates for any inmate on Ohio's death row.

About Us

OTSE was founded in 1987. Its purpose is to end the use of capital punishment in the state of Ohio through education. The views of the members that underlie that purpose are many but can be summarized in two broad categories of opposition, 1) a moral commitment to life that precludes the purposeful killing of any human being and\or, 2) recognition that the death penalty, as it is being implemented in Ohio, is not fair, fails to serve its legal purposes, and is overwhelmingly imposed on indigent, minority, underprivileged and disadvantaged members of society.

Board
Sr. Alice Gerdeman, Chair
Carrie Davis, Vice Chair
Jim Tobin, Treasurer
Kevin Maloney, Secretary
Michael Manley
Sr. Marian Durkin, CSA
Ed Hoover

Donate

Please feel free to use our donation form or simply mail a check payable to OTSE to:

Ohioans To Stop Executions
9 East Long Street, Suite 201
Columbus, OH 43215

Issues

Cost
The death penalty costs more than life in prison. Various state governments estimate that a single death-penalty case from arrest to execution ranges from $1 million up to $7 million. Cases resulting in life imprisonment average around $500,000 each, including the cost of incarceration.
In Ohio, the state spent at least $1,5 million to kill Wilford Berry, a mentally ill man who wanted to be executed. Among the costs were: $18,147 overtime for prison employees and $2,250 overtime for State Highway Patrol officers at the time of the execution. $5,320 on a satellite truck so that the official announcement of Wilford Berry’s execution could be beamed to outside media. Attorney General Bettery Montgomery had 5 to 15 prosecutors working on the case. Between 5 to 10% of the annual budget for the state’s capital-crimes section was devoted to the Berry case for 5 years. Keeping Berry in prison for his entire life would have cost approximately half as much. (Columbus Dispatch, Feb. 28, 1999)

Racial Bias
Nationally, those who kill white people are four times as likely to be sentenced to death as those who kill people of color In Ohio, “[o]ffenders facing a death penalty charge for killing a white person were twice as likely to go to death row than if they had killed a black victim. Death sentences were handed down in 18 percent of cases where the victims were white, compared with 8.5 percent of cases where victims were black.” Victim demographics in Ohio for the year 2002 show that Caucasians accounted for 66% of the total victims in capital cases, while African-Americans only accounted for 29% of the victims in capital cases, although people of color make up more than half of all the homicide victims.

Innocence
Between 1927 and 1986, the state of Ohio released 6 men who had been condemned to death for murder based on evidence of actual innocence. That’s an average of 1 erroneous death per decade. Another 12 men convicted of murder who did not receive the death penalty were also released. That’s an average of one erroneous murder conviction every 4 years.

Economics
Poor defendants cannot afford justice. As of 1999, Ohio had the lowest starting range in hourly rates for court-appointed counsel in capital cases at trial, with an hourly rate of $20 as opposed to the next closest starting range of $30 per hour and a national average of approximately $65 per hour. (The Spangenberg Group)
Each Ohio county sets its own cap for paying defenses attorneys. According to a 2005 AP report, these caps range from $3,000 per capital case in Coshocton County to $75,000 in Montgomery and Wyandot counties. Franklin County reimburses up to $50,000.
Meanwhile, according to the same report, the state trend is a decrease in the amount that Ohio reimburses individual counties for indigent defense. Ohio increased the allocation of funds used for prosecution of capital crimes 60% from 1995 to 1996.

Mental Retardation
National since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, at least 35 people with mental retardation have been executed in the United States. The exact number of people with this disability who re on death row awaiting execution is not known; experts believe there may be two or three hundred.
In Ohio, at least 23 death row inmates had filed appeals based on claims of mental retardation as of June 2003. In 2002, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to execute person with mental retardation.

Arbitrariness
In Ohio less than 2% of murders result in death sentences for convicted killers. From 1983-2000 Ohio experienced 10,585 murders and sentenced 201 to death row. It seems that executions in Ohio are symbolic political rituals that single out a few offenders to die, rather than effective law enforcement.
The death penalty is also geographically arbitrary. With 7.3% of Ohio’s population, Hamilton County accounts for 23% of those on death row and one-third of executions.
In a study of nearly 2000 capital indictments in Ohio from 1981 to 2002, reporters found that “[i]n Cuyahoga County, a Democratic stronghold, just 8 percent of offenders charged with a capital crime received a death sentence. In conservative Hamilton County, 43 percent of capital offenders ended up on death row.”

Friends

American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Project - www.abanet.org/moratorium

American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio - www.acluohio.org

American Friends Service Committee - www.afsc.org

Amnesty International - http://web.amnesty.org/pages/deathpenalty-index-eng

Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty - www.cuadp.org/

Cleveland Coalition Against the Death Penalty - www.clevedp.org

Death Penalty Information Center - www.deathpenaltyinfo.org

Equal Justice USA - www.quixote.org/ej

Interfaith Coalition to Stop Executions - www.stopexecutions.org

Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center - www.ijpc-cincinnati.org

Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation - www.mvfr.org

Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati - www.law.uc.edu/clj

Office of the Ohio Public Defender, Death Penalty Division - http://opd.ohio.gov/dp/dp_DeathPenalty.htm

National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty - www.ncadp.org

About the Ohio Death Penalty

Ohio Executions since Reinstatement of the Death Penalty

For brief information about many of those executed, see the death penalty webpage of Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center.

1. February 19, 1999 - Wilford Berry
2. June 14, 2001 - Jay D. Scott
3. February 19, 2002 - John Byrd, Jr.
4. April 26, 2002 - Alton Coleman
5. September 25, 2002 - Robert Buell
6. February 12, 2003 - Richard Fox
7. April 29, 2003 - David Brewer
8. June 18, 2003 - Earnest Martin
9. January 14, 2004 - Lewis Williams, Jr.
10. February 3, 2004 - John Glenn Roe
11. March 30, 2004 - William Wickline
12. June 8, 2004 - William Zuern
13. July 14, 2004 - Stephen Vrabel
14. July 20, 2004 - Scott Mink
15. October 13, 2004 - Adremy Dennis
16. March 8, 2005 - William H. Smith
17. September 27, 2005 - Herman Dale Ashworth
18. October 26, 2005 - Willie Williams, Jr.
19. November 29, 2005 - John Hicks
20. February 7, 2006 - Glenn Benner
21. May 2, 2006 - Joe Clark
22. July 12, 2006 - Rocky Barton
23. August 8, 2006 - Darrell Ferguson
24. October 10, 2006 - Jeffrey Lundgren
25. April 24, 2007 - James Filiaggi
26. May 24, 2007 - Christopher Newton


Reports and Studies

American Bar Association report on Ohio Death Penaly system
Associated Press Report on the Ohio Death Penalty, May 2005
Ohio Public Defender Death Penalty Division
OH Attorney General’s 2007 Capital Crimes Report: State and Federal Cases
League of Women Voters of Ohio Death Penalty Study
Death Row in Ohio, 2003: The Case for a Study Commission (Preliminary Report of the The Ohio Death Row Research Group, The Urban Justice Institute, University of CincinnatiCollege of Law, January 17, 2003) (pdf)


The Victims

A common misconception about OTSE is that we only work for people on death row. This is simply not the case. OTSE is a coalition of many organizations. Many of our individual members and member organizations work with victims and family members of victims in a variety of ways. Clergy, therapists, social workers, volunteers, and even corrections workers are included in OTSE's membership. OTSE also maintains a close alliance with Homicide Survivors groups around Ohio, as well as Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), a national organization of family members of victims of both homicides and state killings who oppose the death penalty in all cases

Letters to the Editor

A few words of advice before you e-mail:

Check out the newspaper's letters to the editor page. Most newspapers provide their instructions for submission on their letters page, such as word limitations and web-based forms for submission.

Keep your letters brief. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

Do not send your letter to multiple addresses on the same e-mail message. Newspapers are more likely to ignore your letter if they think you sent it to everybody. They like to think they are the only newspaper you sent it to.

Make sure your facts are correct! If you are writing in response to a recent article, be sure to say so in your letter.

Be sure to include your name, address, daytime phone number and your e-mail address. Most newspapers will not print your letter unless they can verify that you actually wrote it and sent it. They will print your name, and possibly your hometown, but not your address or phone number.

If your letter is printed, be sure to send us a copy!

Submit your event

To submit your event to OTSE, print this page, fill it out and fax your completed form to (513) 579-0674. Or send it to:

OTSE
c/o IJPC
215 East 14th Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202-7330

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