OUTLIER COUNTIES: Ohio Death-Row Prisoner Challenges Sentence Based on Hamilton County Race Discrimination Study

An African-American man sentenced to death in Hamilton County, Ohio in 1999 for the murder of a white man is seeking to overturn his conviction and death sentence based on evidence from a recently published study that he was more than five times more likely to be sentenced to death because of his race and the race of the victim in his case.

On September 3, 2021, citing statistical evidence from a study of 25-years of capital prosecutions in the county that the races of the defendant and the victim have significantly influenced the administration of the death penalty in Hamilton County, Walter Raglin filed a motion for a new trial arguing that his conviction and death sentence were the improper product of racial discrimination.

The study, authored by Professors Catherine M. Grosso and Barbara O’Brien at the Michigan State University College of Law and Assistant Federal Public Defender Julie C. Roberts of the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Public Defender for the Southern District of Ohio, and published last year in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review reviewed the treatment of aggravated murder cases in Hamilton County over the quarter century between January 1992 through August 2017. The study found statistically significant evidence of discrimination in charging practices and sentencing outcomes based on both the race of the defendant and the race of the victim.

The authors of the study examined 599 cases in which Hamilton County prosecutors charged defendants with aggravated murder, attempting to ascertain whether whether race played a significant role in the administration of the death penalty. “Hamilton County, Ohio, lies technically just north of the South, but it is close,” the authors wrote. “Its history reflects the emblematic segregation and overt racism associated with the South. … It also remains in the top 2% of counties producing a majority of executions nationally.”

Also considering Hamilton County’s history of racial discrimination, lynchings, and racial segregation, the researchers concluded that “[t]he local practice and history, bolstered by the statistical analysis, makes a strong case that race has influenced the administration of capital punishment” in the county.

NEW SCHOLARSHIP: History Says Those Left on Death Row After Capital Punishment Statutes are Struck Down or Repealed Should Not be Executed

“What should become of individuals who are awaiting execution following the repeal or judicial invalidation of capital punishment legislation?,” ask authors James R. Acker (pictured, left) and Brian W. Stull (pictured, right) in a recent article published in the Akron Law Review. If history is a guide, they say, the prisoners’ lives should be spared.

In Life After Sentence of Death: What Becomes of Individuals Under Sentence of Death After Capital Punishment Legislation is Repealed or Invalidated, published as part of the law journal’s 2021 Criminal Justice Reform Issue, Acker, an emeritus distinguished teaching professor in the University of Albany’s School of Criminal Justice, and Stull, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project, analyzed what happened to prisoners who were on death row in each of the 30 U.S. states that, at some point in their history, abolished capital punishment. The researchers found that while death penalty repeal laws frequently abolish the death penalty only for future crimes or future cases, no one has ever been executed in the United States after the death penalty has been abolished in their jurisdiction. That outcome was the same, they noted, whether abolition occurred as a result of legislative repeal or judicial invalidation of the state’s capital punishment statute.

Acker and Stull also surveyed international practices, looking for post-abolition executions in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and other countries worldwide. Again, they found no examples of prisoners being executed under vestigial death-penalty statutes. And they investigated whether any 16- or 17-year-old death-sentenced offenders were executed in states that subsequently raised the minimum age of death-penalty eligibility to 18. Here, too, the answer was none.

The authors take no position on what the fate should be for individuals left on death row after a non-retroactive abolition of the death penalty. “[D]isagreements about the purposes and fair administration of criminal punishment, political considerations, the interests of murder victims’ survivors, and other factors combine to make answers to this question elusive,” they write. However, they say, “in practice, the issue has been resolved with striking uniformity. Historically, in this country and throughout the world, the apparent universal practice has been to spare individuals from execution if they are under sentence of death at the time capital punishment laws are repealed or invalidated.”

“[T]hese actions,” they write, “speak loudly, and quite arguably more loudly than words, as actions often do.”

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