Opinion: Ohio botched killing a man once, now it wants another chance

The state of Ohio tried five years ago to kill Romell Broom, and botched it. After two hours of failing to embed the intravenous sheath into a vein through which they could inject lethal drugs (some 18 separate painful attempts as they hit either muscle or bone), the executioners gave up and Broom, who was sure he was about to die, was returned to his cell.

Now Ohio wants to try again.

If it’s wrong for a state to execute one of its own citizens — and it is — then it’s doubly wrong to try to do it a second time. Especially since the state, inadvertent though it might have been, tortured Broom in the first go-around.

Here’s the usual caveat for the bloodthirsty crowd: Romell committed a brutal crime, the knife-point rape, then stabbing murder, of a 14-year-old girl he grabbed as she walked home from a high school football game. No sympathy deserved. But the death penalty isn’t about the actions of the condemned. It’s about the actions of the state.

In this case, Broom’s lawyers will argue before the Ohio Supreme Court that the state shouldn’t get a second chance at executing Broom because to do so would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. It’s a fair argument. The first execution was not intended as a mock execution; the state fully intended to kill Broom. But the net effect is similar. Broom sat in the cell as the executioners repeatedly stabbed him with needles (yes, there’s an irony here, given his crime) but then ultimately didn’t execute him. The procedure stopped when Gov. Ted Strickland ordered a reprieve until prison officials could figure out what to do.

Notably, during the process, Broom asked to have his lawyer, who was nearby, brought in to stand as a witness to his treatment, according to a court filing, but his request was rejected. Under Ohio’s execution protocol, once an execution starts, the condemned cannot have contact with legal counsel. Broom was told that as far as the state was concerned, the execution had begun. Yet the state argues now in court filings that the execution had not begun. Ohio can’t have it both ways.

There’s another troubling aspect to this. Under international law, torture, which includes mock executions, is banned. Ohio didn’t intend to torture Broom, and the botched execution wasn’t done for gain (to extract information or compel behavior). But the net effect is the same. A man was brought to the brink of what he thought was going to be his death, which became a long, drawn-out ordeal (accounts say he was in pain and emotional as the process dragged on). And now Ohio wants another go at it, which seems cruel, and is definitely unusual.

It’s hard to say what the Ohio Supreme Court will do. Because there are so few survivors of execution attempts, there is little case law. And what there is sides with the state.

This, of course, isn’t the only problem Ohio has had with its lethal injections. In January, Dennis McGuire writhed and groaned for 10 minutes or so as the drugs coursed through his body, an execution that ultimately took nearly half an hour to complete. The protocol was new. The state has since revised it by increasing the dosages, but a federal judge has suspended the death penalty there until August to give lawyers a chance to review and challenge the new procedure.

So not only is the death penalty morally indefensible and deeply flawed legally (from false convictions to inconsistent application), it is also poorly and inhumanely carried out. Our continued embrace of these state-conducted killings is a dark reflection on us as a society.