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17 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 77 (2019-2020)
From Proponent to Opponent: My Lifelong Struggle with the Death Penalty

handle is hein.journals/osjcl17 and id is 85 raw text is: From Proponent to Opponent: My Lifelong Struggle with the Death Penalty Jim Petro* I have a long history with the death penalty. As a young attorney with an interest in politics in the mid-1970s, I could never have anticipated that over the course of my career I would inadvertently, and frequently, interface with the death penalty, or that I would evolve from a proponent to an opponent. My changing views would parallel diminishing national support for state-sponsored death, in part, because new understandings challenged every claimed benefit of capital punishment. Unlike most people, I not only observed the changed death penalty debate, I was directly engaged: first as a legislator involved in the reconstitution of the modern death penalty in Ohio, later as an official overseer of the execution of 19 men, and still later as a stunned student of startling new truths revealed by DNA. My support for capital punishment dwindled in part as my understanding of wrongful convictions grew. DNA-proven wrongful convictions shook the foundations of my beliefs about our criminal justice system. Wrongful conviction became the subject of a book I co-wrote with my wife, Nancy Petro: False Justice-Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent. Nancy and I did not want to include a discussion of the death penalty in this effort to explore flawed justice. Our good friend, Mark Godsey, esteemed law professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and co-founder and Director of the Ohio Innocence Project, reviewed our manuscript and wisely recommended: You have to discuss the death penalty. It is inextricably bound to wrongful conviction, he said. Your readers will want to know how you reconcile the two. He was right. I. THE FIRST FORTY YEARS The evolution of my struggle with the death penalty through my personal experiences-from Ohio legislator, to Ohio Attorney General, to Innocence Pro Bono lawyer-is best shared from pertinent passages in False Justice, with some updates to the revised edition published in 2015 by Routledge. Throughout this paper, excerpts from the book are indicated in italics.1 Former Attorney General of Ohio, 2003-07 JIM PETRO & NANCY PETRO, FALSE JUSTICE; EIGHT MYTHS THAT CoNvIcr THE INNOCENT (Routledge rev. ed. 2015) (2010).

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