Cruel and Unusual

Richard Cooey has another date with the Death Chamber in Lucasville, but first the process takes precedence.

As we reported on AkronNewsNow this morning, the Ohio Supreme Court has set Tuesday, October 14, 2008 for Cooey's second trip from an Ohio Death Row to the Southern Ohio Correctional Institution in Lucasville (for the sake of brevity we'll call it a state prison). Back in 2004 Phil Trexler of the Akron Beacon Journal and I were among the local media covering the story, including serving as witnesses to the execution. It didn't happen after three different levels of federal judges -- a circuit judge in Cleveland, the Court of Appeals in Cincinnati and finally the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. issued stay after stay. The final order came down with about an hour and 15 minutes to spare; if the nation's highest court had ordered the lethal injection to go ahead Cooey's last moments would have ended the day of legal wrangling and nearly 20 years waiting for his sentence to be carried out.

Both Phil and I had interviews with Cooey on Death Row, then at the state prison in Mansfield. You can listen to portions of the interview through this link; it was chilling then and still has an impact to hear this man who has spent more time on Death Row than as a free man. At the time he did not dispute his murders of Wendy Offredo and Dawn McCreery in the woods behind Rolling Acres Mall after a night of terrorizing the young women; he asked no forgiveness, neither from God nor his victims nor their families. He didn't even protest that the Death Penalty was too strict for his crime: he was appealing, he told me, because he could. Innocence or legal malpractice weren't the grounds: because someone else was challenging it would be enough.


It worked, if only to give him a four-year postponement of what the McCreery family has pushed for since the 1986 death of their daughter and her friend: final justice. But don't consider October 14th to be written in stone.

There's a new Governor in office, and while Bob Taft swiftly denied any clemency that decision will now rest with Ted Strickland. This Governor, with his background of working with inmates and his faith, has shown he's not a rubber-stamp for opponents of capital punishment. It is hard to imagine he will stray far from the sentence in this case, either. The inmate doesn't really dispute the facts nor the punishment; his lawyers cleverly argued the case should piggyback talk that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment, and that was enough to extend another reprieve. There will need to be another hearing to determine if Cooey is worthy of executive clemency, and appeals of other cases may still carry enough weight to trigger another round of federal appeals. If so, the families of the victims will have to continue the wait they've endured for 22 years; when taking a life, society owes it to the process to make sure the process is fully satisfied, but the core question is determining that satisfaction.

I find the argument on "cruel and unusual" a crock. Each day across this country there are millions of individuals who undergo the usual of injection -- for regular blood tests, while in the hospital, even part of a legal system that may need a blood sample for prove or disprove charges. Hardly unusual. If inserting a shunt into one's arm is unusual, ask the thousands who regularly walk into dialysis everyday for life-saving blood cleansing.

As to whether it is cruel? Very few, if any, of those getting stuck think it's a walk in the park. But in searching for a humane way to put animals down society has chosen an swift injection which put them to sleep. In the case of executing men and women who have committed the most heinous of crimes, the argument that being forced to go to sleep while another drug stops the breathing and beating of the heart (a six-minute process, on average by my observation as a witness to three other executions) is not cruel, it is humane.

The case of The People v Richard Wade Cooey has victims all around: Wendy and Dawn, their families and friends, strangers who worried about their daughter's safety because of the case, Cooey's adopted father, an Akron police officer who died of a broken heart. It is hard to imagine Cooey as a victim, especially in listening to his own words to draw the conclusion he doesn't even see himself as a victim but as someone caught who had an opportunity to use the system he despoiled to live another day.

There are plenty of cases involving the death penalty that cry out for time to appeal, time to reconsider, time to examine whether the process was righteous, fair and proper. To say no one innocent ever walked those final steps is incredibly naive, but this is not one of those cases.