First Ohio execution in 36 years
Death penalty foes hold statewide protests
By
Martha Grevatt
Cleveland
In 1977 the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty.
The first person to die was a so-called "volunteer"--Gary Gil
more. He was executed by the state of Utah.
On Feb. 19, at 9:31 p.m., Wilford Lee Berry was pronounced
dead. He was the first person to be executed by the state of
Ohio since 1963. Like Gilmore, Berry was labeled a "volunteer,"
having expressed a preference for death over spending endless
years on death row.
However, conditions on death row--
inmates' hands and feet are shackled and they are confined to
their cells 23 hours a day--raise questions about the
"voluntary" nature of this prisoner's "death wish."
Arguing for a stay of execution, the Ohio public defender
attempted to paint a portrait of the so-called "volunteer."
Berry was the son of a physically abusive mother and a father
who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. As a youth he was
brutalized and molested by his peers.
At age 14 Berry too was diagnosed as schizoid. He served
time as a young adult for stealing a car. After being raped in
prison he cut deep gouges in his arm and was seen by doctors
because of hallucinations.
In November 1989, after spending many years drifting from
state to state, Berry returned to Cleveland and began working
for baker Charles Mitroff. Three days later he and an
accomplice shot Mitroff to death, burying the body and fleeing
in Mitroff's van.
Berry was soon captured. On Aug. 1, 1990, Berry was
sentenced to death. Court-appointed psychiatrists consistently
ignored Berry's history and ruled him competent to stand
trial.
Not surprisingly, one of the many groups that opposed the
execution was the Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Religious
bodies of all denominations appealed to Ohio Gov. Bob Taft to
spare Berry's life. Recently, the governor's office
"discovered" a letter supporting Berry, which had supposedly
been misplaced among the stacks of mail received on a daily
basis.
This lost letter was from none other than Pope John
Paul.
Over 100 death-penalty opponents gathered outside Lucasville
prison, where the execution took place, voicing sadness and
anger upon receiving news of Berry's death by lethal injection.
The response was similar at vigils held simultaneously around
the state.
Now that Ohio has become the 30th state since the 1977
ruling to execute its citizens, the question for death-penalty
opponents and death-row inmates is, who's next?
There are 191 men currently on death row. Ninety-six--just
over half of them--are African American.
None of them is rich.
While Ohio's first execution was of a white person, it is
likely that the death penalty will now be used as the racist
weapon of state terror that it is in every other state.
However, death-penalty opponents vow that each and every
subsequent execution by the capitalist state will be met with
protests until this barbaric, racist and anti-working-class
practice is ended once and for all.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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