Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (pictured) has halted all executions in the state until its Department of Rehabilitation and Correction is able to develop a new execution protocol that gains approval from the courts. Responding to the findings of a federal court that likened Ohio’s three-drug lethal-injection protocol to a combination of waterboarding and chemical fire, DeWine said “Ohio is not going to execute someone under my watch when a federal judge has found it to be cruel and unusual punishment.” DeWine announced his decision at an Associated Press forum in Columbus on February 19. The Republican governor did not set a date on which he expected executions to resume, saying “[a]s long as the status quo remains, where we don’t have a protocol that has been found to be OK, we certainly cannot have any executions in Ohio.”

On January 22, federal magistrate Judge Michael Merz issued an opinion saying that executions under Ohio’s current drug protocol “will almost certainly subject [prisoners] to severe pain and needless suffering.” Mertz noted that 24 of 28 available autopsies from executions involving the sedative midazolam – the first drug in Ohio’s protocol – showed evidence of pulmonary edema, a build-up of fluid in the lungs that was “painful, both physically and emotionally, inducing a sense of drowning and the attendant panic and terror, much as would occur with the torture tactic known as waterboarding.” Mertz found that midazolam lacked the pharmacological properties necessary to keep the prisoner unconscious during the administration of the paralytic second drug, rocuronium bromide, and the heart-stopping third drug, potassium chloride. As a result, he said, the prisoner would experience the sensation of “fire … being poured” through his veins when those drugs were administered. The court’s ruling led DeWine to issue a six-month reprieve to death-row prisoner Warren Keith Henness, who had been scheduled to be executed February 13.

DeWine sponsored Ohio’s capital punishment law as a state senator in 1981 and later represented the state in death-penalty cases as its Attorney General. The governor, who is Catholic and identifies himself as pro-life, has not said how those beliefs affect his stance on the death penalty. When reporters at the forum asked about his personal views on capital punishment, DeWine equivocated. “It is the law of the state of Ohio,” he said. “And I’ll let it go [not comment further] at this point. We are seeing clearly some challenges that you have all reported on in regard to carrying out the death penalty.” Ohio has six more executions scheduled in 2019 and 23 scheduled through 2023.

Kevin Werner of Ohioans to Stop Executions praised the governor’s decision, but cautioned that broad problems identified in a 2014 Task Force Report on the state’s death penalty still need to be addressed. The people set to be executed, he said, are among the most vulnerable in the criminal legal system: “They are people who are poor, who killed white victims, and who have some underlying substance abuse or abuse as children or have a mental illness – I mean, that’s who we’re talking about here."

(Jessie Balmert, Gov. Mike DeWine: Ohio won't execute prisoners until method gets court's OK, Cincinnati Enquirer, February 19, 2019; Jim Provance, DeWine: Ohio executions unlikely in near future, Toledo Blade, February 19, 2019; Andrew J. Tobias, Gov. Mike DeWine freezes all Ohio executions while new method developed, Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 19, 2019; Karen Kasler, Anti-Death Penalty Group Pleased But Still Concerned About Upcoming Executions, Statehouse News Bureau, February 21, 2019.) See Lethal Injection.

Overturning the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for the second time, the United States Supreme Court ruled on February 19, 2019, that Texas death-row prisoner Bobby James Moore is intellectually disabled and may not be executed. In an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court reversed the latest Texas appeals court decision that would have allowed Moore’s execution, saying the state court had relied on many of the same improper lay stereotypes and committed many of the same errors that had led the Justices two years ago to strike down Texas’s “outlier” approach to determining intellectual disability. The Court said that the Texas ruling, “when taken as a whole and when read in the light both of our prior opinion and the trial court record, rests upon analysis too much of which too closely resembles what we previously found improper.”

This decision marked the second time the Supreme Court had reversed a Court of Criminal Appeals denial of Moore’s intellectual disability claim. In 2014, a Texas trial court, applying prevailing clinical standards, found that Moore was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty under the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) overturned that decision, saying Moore had not satisfied a Texas-specific standard called the “Briseño factors” (named after the Texas court decision that announced them). In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected the use of these factors, calling them an unscientific “invention” of the TCCA that was “untied to any acknowledged source” and lacked support from “any authority, medical or judicial.” The Court criticized the TCCA’s reliance upon “lay stereotypes” about what people with intellectual disability can and cannot do and its misplaced focus on things Moore was able to do in a structured prison setting instead of considering his life history of impairments in daily adaptive functioning, and directed the TCCA to reconsider the issue applying appropriate diagnostic standards.

When the case returned to the state courts, numerous groups, including the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, filed friend-of-the-court briefs asserting that Moore met the prevailing medical definitions of intellectual disability. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office agreed with Moore and conceded that his death sentence should be vacated. Nonetheless, over the sharp dissent of three judges, the TCCA again upheld Moore’s death sentence. With the backing of the mental health professional associations, Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver, and a group of prominent conservative leaders who described the TCCA’s flouting of the 2017 Supreme Court ruling as “inimical to the rule of law,” Moore again asked the Supreme Court to intervene. When Harris County prosecutors again agreed that Moore was entitled to relief, the Texas Attorney General’s office attempted to intervene in the case to defend the TCCA’s ruling. The Supreme Court reversed, writing: “We … agree with Moore and the prosecutor that, on the basis of the trial court record, Moore has shown he is a person with intellectual disability.” Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, dissented, accusing the majority of improperly engaging in factfinding and failing to provide clarity to lower courts.

Cliff Sloan, a lawyer representing Moore, praised the ruling: “We greatly appreciate today’s important ruling from the Supreme Court, and we are very pleased that justice will be done for Bobby Moore.” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg also released a statement: “The Harris County District Attorney’s Office disagreed with our state’s highest court and the attorney general to stand for Justice in this case. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed."

(D. Cassens Weiss, “For a second time, Supreme Court rules for Texas death-row inmate claiming intellectual disability” ABA Journal, February 19, 2019; K. Blakinger, “Supreme Court sides with intellectually disabled Harris County death row inmate for second time”, Houston Chronicle, February 19, 2019; J. McCullough, “For the second time, U.S. Supreme Court reverses death sentence decision for Texas inmate Bobby Moore”, Texas Tribune, February 19, 2019; Lawrence Hurley, U.S. Supreme Court bars Texas from executing death row inmate, Reuters, February 19, 2019.) Read the Supreme Court’s opinion in Moore v. Texas, No. 18–443 (U.S. Feb. 19, 2019). See U.S. Supreme Court and Intellectual Disability.