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The Real Killer Season 2: Ep. 10, The Clock Is Ticking

Published Apr 13, 2023, 7:02 AM

The State of Ohio has been executing people since the 1800’s, but there are some people on opposite sides of the political spectrum now trying to end that. Will capital punishment in Ohio soon be a thing of the past? And how, if at all, will that affect Death Row inmate Keith Lamar?


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A warning. This episode contains language and depictions of violence that may be disturbing to some listeners. In the United States, only people get the depth. John poor white, poor blacks, and poor his fans. You know, I don't know, rich person, don't get that type of guilty. Derek Jamison death Row Exonerie number one nineteen came within hours of being executed by the State of Ohio. We got one of the best court systems in the world, but we make mistake and we should never had a death Johney, because a lot of poor people go die, like Keith Lamar, who is scheduled to be executed by the State of Ohio on November sixteenth, twenty twenty three. No, my time, the clappers went out, putting Keith's innocence or guilt aside. Is the death penalty fair? And will the changes some are trying to make even in this case, and now we're down two months. My time is steadily you know, running out. I'm Leah Rothman. This is the real Killer Episode ten. The clock is ticking. Let's be real. The death penalty has been a controversial subject for some time now. It seems the first recorded execution in the United States was in sixteen oh eight, when the states were still just a bunch of colonies. According to a database of executions called the sp File, from sixteen oh eight to nineteen seventy six, more than fourteen thousand people were executed. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since nineteen seventy six, there have been fifteen hundred and sixty three people executed in the United States, and in Ohio. Since the state first started executing people, three hundred and ninety three people have been put to death. In the eighteen hundreds, people were publicly hanged, then came the electric chair. In nineteen seventy two, the US Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional. In seventy four, the state revised the death penalty law, but the US Supreme Court rejected it. So in nineteen eighty one, Ohio drafted a new law to reflect the strict criteria for imposing the death sentence, and lawmakers enacted that Eighteen years later, the state resumed executions there. First was Wilfred Barry, nicknamed the Volunteer because Barry actually volunteered to be executed. In two thousand and one, the states stopped using the electric chair and Old Sparky, the electric chair at Lucasville was officially decommissioned. All executions from that point on have been carried out by lethal injection. Some years later, Dayton's WDTN reports a Preble County killer is dead tonight after the state's first execution of twenty fourteen, Dennis McGuire was also the first in the nation to receive a new two drug combination because of a shortage of penabarbital. Reportedly because of that new drug cocktail, Dennis McGuire chokes and gasps for air for almost twenty five minutes before dying. In the years that follow, several executions are stayed because of questions regarding Ohio's execution protocol, but in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, three more people are put to death. Then there's another break in the carrying out of executions, but not in the eduling of them. In December of twenty eighteen, Cincinnati's w KRC Local twelve reports the Ohio Supreme Court set an execution day for Keith Lamar. He's scheduled to die November sixteenth of twenty twenty three, just months after Keith's date is set. A federal judge comes out and compares Ohio's execution protocol to a combination of waterboarding, suffocation, and exposure to chemical fire. So Governor Mike DeWine postpones executions in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty. Here he is in a twenty twenty interview with the Associated Press. We do have really an unofficial moratorium. You know, there's not going to be an execution in their state unless the state legislature changes the law. They would have to come up with a different way of execution other than lethal injection. Lethal injection is the only way prescribed under the current law, and lethal injection appears to us to be impossible from a practical point of view today. But looking for a different method in which to kill people is very different than opposing it altogether. Justification for capital punishment is that it saves lives, It serves as a deterrent, and that would be the moral justification. So although Ohio today still has an unofficial moratorium on executions, Keith and his supporters are preparing themselves for the worst, believing the state might jump start them in time to put to death. Keith, one of the first of the notorious Lucasville five. When it comes to Ohio legislators, many aren't spending their time looking for a new protocol in which to execute people. They're hard at work trying to put an end to capital punishment for once and for all. There's a lot of reasons for people to be against the death penalty. That's State Senator Nicki Antonio, whom I speak with over zoom. She says finding a better way in which to kill people isn't good enough. A Democrat who is currently the minority leader, Antonio has been working to abolish the death penalty since she first took office as a state representative back in twenty eleven. Back then, there were three issues closest to her heart. One of them was, as a former teacher and a special ed teacher, I really wanted to affect public policy, and at the time, it was the way we fund public schools. Our funding had been found to be unconstitutional, and so I really wanted to go to Columbus and make a difference in that arena. One was fairness for the LGBTQ community. I'm the first person to ever get elected in the state of Ohio to the legislature from the LGBTQ community, So it goes without saying that. I thought myself, my family, and my people should also be considered equal in the state of Ohio. The third thing was ending the death penalty in the state of Ohio, and over time her fight to abolish the death penalty has gained some unlikely support. I am not a liberal by any shot of the imagination. If you look at my bio, I'm as red as red can be. I'm a very conservative person. That's Republican State Representative Jean Schmidt. I speak with her over zoom too. Representative Schmidt began her political career as a state representative in two thousand and one, then spent seven plus years in the US House of Representatives, and is now back serving her second term in the Ohio House of Representatives. Her position on capital punishment has gone from one end of the spectrum to the absolute other. I went to the state legislature, fought to keep the death penalty, went to Congress, and still starting to evolve into questioning the death penalty. It's when I left Congress met sister Helen Prejean. I read that book Dead Man Walking. I'm going to go hear her, and she talked about it from God's position. These are people just like you and I are people, and God creates everyone to love Him, to know love and serve him. And whilst some of us continue to try to do that every day, others get off the beaten path. But that doesn't mean there are any less of a child of God. And we are pro life at the beginning through fertilization, and we say natural death. Killing somebody by artificial means no matter what the reason is wrong, and that's what really unsettled me. And meeting Joe Dambroggio was another one, and his story is so powerful. It's like a John Brisham novel. He's in prison for twenty five years, he's on death row and he was exonerated and I happened to be there when he got out and he was talking about it, and it had a profound impact. And when some of my friends and my cousin thought I should go back into the state legislature, I prayed about it and said, Okay, God, if you want me to do this, I said, but I promise you I will work hard to end the death penalty, and I will work hard to end abortion and I have been true to that promise. While it's an understatement to say that Representative Schmidt and Senator Antonio are on opposite sides of the abortion debate, they are aligned when it comes to doing a way with the death penalty. Here's Senator Antonio again, there are certain things that we should not be legislating. Certainly around the issue of choice, that's one of them. But around the issue of whether or not to execute someone, I believe the legislature should intervene and say none of us should make that decision. And she says there are many reasons why, because it's the right thing to do in terms of human beings, not taking a life that states sanction. There's religious practice, there's the inequities of the death penalty, and in Ohio, the margins couldn't be clearer about the inequities with how the death penalty is dispensed. There's a former Chief Justice in Ohio who was responsible for bringing the death penalty back and then years later actually came and testified for my bill to end the use of the death penalty because he said, this bill, this law has become a lottery, a death lottery for people of color. He called it out. He knew that it was the way it was put into practice was unfair, and the only way he saw to make anything fair was to take it away. I mean, that's pretty sobering. So there's many reasons. Then there's the reason of recidivism. Does it prevent anyone from committing murder because they think they're going to get the death penalty? And nobody's been able to prove that that it's a deterrent. It's not a deterrent. And finally, one of the biggest reasons, some of the most compelling information we have is that we don't always get it right. Even with DNA information, even with all of the science behind everything, we have gotten it wrong. And over the years we have a number of people that have been exonerated in the state of Ohio. Y'aller takes this one person. If there's one exonery that comes in front of us because we got it wrong, that should tell us that we can never be sure that we get it right. Here's Representative Jean Schmidt. Again, look at the Tony Uponovich story. This guy didn't even do the crime. Anthony Aponovich was convicted and sentenced to death for the nineteen eighty four rape and murder of Marianne Flynn in Cleveland. After spending about twenty years on death row, they discover that the prosecution withheld DNA. They get it tested, it proves he didn't do it. If he didn't raper, then you didn't kill her. When he was let go, it was with prejudice. The prosecutor realized that they didn't do a proper format on the DNA. So he's back on death row and they can never use that DNA again because it's no longer new evidence. That Anthony Aponovitch story is crazy, right, I mean, if I understand correctly, it came down to a technicality that he didn't ask the DNA to be tested. He was out for almost three years, right, and then they picked him up and took him back to prison based on that technicality because he didn't know to ask to have that DNA tested, Which is just it's mind blowing. That's something like that could happen and he could be executed. When I met sister Helen Preischon, she talked about a case in Louisiana who they had the evidence to prove the guiddn't do it. They were two minutes late at the federal court to deliver it he was executing. This is crazy to kill on a technicality when they're innocent, and yet we have the opportunity to do it in Ohio. I do have a bill to correct the DNA issue, but while I'm asking for it to be retroactive, the prosecutors will most likely object, and so it will be a moving forward bill, so it won't answer his problem, it'll address future problems. And that's just crazy. And the man didn't do it. He didn't rape her, so he didn't kill her. I have visited him and he said, you know, the saddest he said, the most tortuous thing for him is having freedom for almost three years, being able to smell the air that you and I smell. He married a woman that was his age. She had grandchildren she was raising. He finally got to have kids that he could help raise. He had the life he's wanted and deserved, and we took it away on a technicality. But now, almost four decades later, Anthony Apanovich still sits on death row. To bec clear, you want to abolish the death penalty, not just for the innocence, but for the guilty as well. It doesn't matter if you're guilty or innocence. There should not be a death penalty in Ohio anymore. No. Now, it doesn't end the torture for the victims. It costs more money, cost more money to house, It costs more money to prosecute, cost more money to kill him. I continue my conversation with Ohio State Representative Jean Schmidt. My county, Claremont County, we don't do the death penalty because of the cost involved of bringing it to trial. It can bankrupt to county. If you're a wealthy county like Hamilton County or Cuyahoga County, how you can afford that expense, But when you're a Claremont County you can't. According to the Dayton Daily News, death penalty cases in Ohio cost on average three million dollars, compared to one million for people's sentenced to life without parole. And by the way, according to a twenty eighteen Cincinnati Inquirer article, Hamilton County, where Keith Lamar's prosecutors are from, has had more death penalty cases and has executed more people than in all of Ohio's eighty eight counties since nineteen eighty one. In fact, according to that same article, in twenty eighteen, Hamilton County had more people on death row per capita than other major cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Miami. The reason why is not clear cut, but one reason might be that Hamilton County has been a conservative county that elects conservative prosecutors who have a tough on crime mentality. I wonder who does Senator nicki Antonio say she gets the most resistance from and why. You know, it's interesting because many prosecutors have come out and actually told me they are now recently supportive of ending the death penalty because they see the traps that are created, and that many of them have told me they believe things would be a lot more clear cut if we didn't have it anymore. Not all the prosecutors are there, So that's one that's one issue that they lose some kind of leverage or some kind of negotiation tool if you're going to negotiate with the death penalty, just as easily negotiate with life without parole, which is a horrible, horrible sentence. Frankly, I've visited many of the prisons. I've visited the high security ones. That is not a place I would want to live my life out my years out for sure. Some folks in law enforcement believe that there should always be an exemption for someone who commits murder against a law A person in law enforcement and believes that that should be the exception, So there's some pushback there. The final place I think where there's pushback, whether real or perceived, is that folks make this and I think it's a false notion to equate being tough on crime with being pro death penalty. I believe you can be very tough on crime and still want to abolish the use of the death penalty. I think those things are not mutually exclusive at all. One of the biggest misnomers I think that sometimes people think that this is about protecting the families of victims, or that victims families want us to execute perpetrators. And what I've heard from families that's really stunned me was to the contrary that they actually would like the death penalty ended, because every time there's an appeal, every time there's a new court case, the family has to relive this terrible tragic thing that happened to their family and their loved one, and frankly, they've said they would like an end to this. They want closure. Put that person behind bars, keep them there, let them wake up every day and think about what they did to put themselves there. And there are some people who have talked to me, victims families, who have said, but I also want that person to have an opportunity for redemption, which when you think about, I don't know that I could be that person that's really powerful. So on some days when this is really really hard, that motivates me to keep going. According to Gallup's twenty twenty two annual poll on Values and Beliefs, fifty five percent of Americans who participated in this survey said they believe the death penalty is morally acceptable. Before interviewing Senator Antonio and Representative Schmidt, I told them that our focus this season is on the Lucasville uprising Keith Lamar and how he is the first of the five men on death row to be given an execution date. Here's Representative Jeane Schmidt. Lucasville at the time was an awful place, and prisoners do have some rights and they were being neglected. So this riot occurred and it was a very touchy situation. I remember reading it in the Enquirer and my family discussing it at the kitchen table. I don't know whether he's innocent or guilty, but I have enough suspicions that if I was on the jury, I would never allow for the death penalty to occur. I think this state had too much motive to get it. I think that the state wanted to find a person. He had already killed somebody in his life, so what did it matter? People said he did it, so let's pinot on him. I think that was too easy of a mote of it for it. And yeah, it does bother me if Grady material was withheld from him. Look, I'm not anti prosecutors, believe me, but I have a problem with the way evidence is presented that the prosecutor can determine what evidence the other side gets. I have a real problem with that. If there's evidence, for God's sake, show it period. Let's get a clear picture of what happened. Don't mess around with it. I don't care whether it's a death penalty case or an armed robbery. Show all the evidence, and you know you can't just have the snitch. You got to have something else besides the snitch and we're not doing that. Yeah, And all of the rulings since have said basically, whatever new evidence has been presented would not have changed the original verdict. It would not have changed the minds of the jurors. But how do we know. By the way, there's no physical evidence tying any of the five men who are on death row to any of the crimes. But everything came down to snitch testimony, and like every single person who testified against Keith got some sort of deal, shortened players and sentenced better sell depending upon how you perform, you get a better work detail, etc. So, yeah, that's why I'm concerned with snitch testimony. In twenty eleven, the Ohio Supreme Court, in conjunction with the Ohio Bar Association, asked for a joint task force to review the administration of Ohio's death penalty. In twenty fourteen, the task force, made up of twenty three members, which included prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, law enforcement legislators, and law professors, submitted their report and recommendations. Of the fifty six recommendations, numbers seventeen and eighteen are of particular interest. Number seventeen recommends making a law that a death sentence cannot be considered or imposed unless the state has either biological evidence or DNA evidence that links the defendant to the act of murder, a videotaped voluntary interrogation and confession of the defendant to the murder, or a video recording that conclusively links the defendant to the murder. Number eighteen recommends they not permit a death sentence where the state relies on jailhouse informant testimony that is not independently corroborated at the guilt innocence phase of the death penalty trial. These two recommendations were never adopted by the Ohio legislature. Here's Senator Nicki Antonio. I was asked to serve on that commission at some point, and I respectfully declined because I was told from the beginning that what was not on the table was an end to the death penalty. And I said, well, if that's not on the table, I appreciate all of the other work that's being done, but as long as that's there, that's the key element to me of where there are inequities and where there are problems with this system. By the way back in two thousand and five, the American Bar Association recommended that in death penalty cases, no prosecution should occur based solely an uncorroborated jailhouse informant testimony, and that quote, no person should lose liberty or life based solely on the testimony of such a witness. I continue my conversation with state Representative Jean Schmidt about why there is an unofficial temporary hold on executions in Ohio. You know, we can't get the drug that was out there for many years because the pharmaceutical company will not give it to us to kill people. So a few years ago, a law was passed to allow compounding pharmacies and doctors to be anonymous and get immunity so that they can't get prosecuted. The doctor to write the script, and the compounding pharmacy to create the product. Well, they did that and it didn't work out so well. It violated the Eighth Amendment. So we don't have a drug out there. Now. Technically you could shoot them or hang them, but I have a strange feeling the people of Ohio aren't gonna like either, even those advocates of death row. That's a very ruesome way to end somebody's life, and I all think so think it as racial overtones because when you think of what the slaves had to go through, it was either hanging or shooting. So when you have a larger population of people of color, people of color whose ancestors may or may not have been of slaves, that brings up a whole racial undertone that I don't think is acceptable to the public. So the governor said fix it, Well, there is no fix except to end it. Would you agree that it's hypocritical for a state to take someone's life when they say you're not allowed to take someone's life, Yeah, it is. It is hypocritical, but it's more more immoral to do that. Do we have the right to take a life? Do we have a right to take a life at conception? Do we have a right to take a life at natural death? Over the years, there have been some small legislative victories in the fight towards ending the death penalty in Ohio, like banning it for defendants who are severely mentally ill at the time of the offense. But where does things stand today? Here's Senator Nicky Antonio. We had a lot of momentum earlier last year where we really thought we were moving towards really ending in the death penalty. That there are two bills. There's a bill in the House and a bill in the Senate. This time, for the very first time, we have joint sponsors on both bills. That's significant because when you have the lead sponsors as a Republican and a Democrat working in tandem in the state of Ohio, that means a lot. And so we have that in both the House and the Senate. But here's the kicker. If the bill is one day past, it would not be retroactive. It would only effect future cases, so Keith and all the others on Ohio's death row would not be able to benefit from it. In the meantime, the clock is ticking because in Ohio, if we don't get a bill passed in the two year cycle of that General Assembly, we have to start all over again in the next one. The bill was not passed as of the end of twenty twenty two, so time officially ran out. A new two year cycle began January first of twenty twenty three and will expire December thirty feet of twenty twenty four, So where does Republican Governor Mike Dwine stand on whether or not he'll sign the bill into law. So it's been really interesting because numerous times I think people have gone to Governor Dwine and asked him, what would you do if the bill gets passed? Will you sign it? Will you let it go for word? And he's been noncommittal. I've reached out to Governor DeWine's office with requests for an interview, but have yet to hear back. Every time we talk about the inability to actually complete an execution, someone throws out all these barbaric ways of executing someone, and again, I don't believe that's the answer. I think the answer is to stop doing it. Do you have high hopes that Ohio will be the twenty fourth state to abolish the death penalty? Yes? I do. It's the right thing. I truly believe that we will get this resolved, hopefully this year, because it's the right thing to do for Keith. With every passing day he marches closer to a scheduled execution date. Who knows, this might be my last shill on this earth. But until that time, you know, I tend to keep living My team to leave it all on the courts, as they say, next time, I'm the Real Killer. I believe that Keith is not guilty. He wanted to go to trial because he was naive, he was young, and he believed in the American justice system, and he was punished for that. Keith has a serious message for his punishers. But if and when my time comes, they will know that how I feel about them in this bullshit system. I'm not gonna, you know, play the meek role, you know, the you know, the forgiving slaves. Won't be able to go home and put your kids in the bid because you're gonna have to murder me. You have to murder somebody when that day comes. That's on everything I love, On everything I love. Who have the murder pain? Please check out at the Real Killer on Instagram for some never before seen photos and documents. Also, if you're so inclined, leave us a five star review. Reviews increased the odds that other listeners like you will find us. The Real Killer is a production of AYR Media and iHeartRadio, hosted by me Leah Rothman. Executive producers Leah Rothman and Eliza Rosen for AYR Media. Written by Leah Rothman, Executive producer, Paulina Williams, Senior Associate producer, Jill Pasheznik. Coordinators George Famm and Melina Kryski. Editing and sound design by Cameron Taggy, mixed and mastered by Cameron Taggy, Audio engineering by Matt Jacobson Studio and peering by Jay Brannon. Legal counsel for AYR Media. Gianni Douglas, executive producer for iHeartRadio, Maya Howard

The Real Killer

One autumn night in 1997, 18-year-old Anastasia WitbolsFeugen is found brutally murdered, her body d 
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