0 Comments · Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Gov. John Kasich last week denied a
request for clemency from Mark Wayne Wiles, who was convicted in 1986 of
the murder of a 15-year-old boy in northeastern Ohio. Wiles was scheduled to be executed April
18, the day this issue is published, at the Southern Ohio Correctional
Facility in Lucasville.
by Danny Cross
04.11.2012
Convicted murderer to be first execution since moratorium lifted
Gov. John Kasich today
denied a request for executive clemency from Mark Wayne Wiles, who
was convicted in 1986 of the murder of 15-year-old Mark Klima in the
northeast Ohio township of Rootstown.
Wiles is scheduled to
be executed April 18 at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in
Lucasville. According to the clemency report, members of the Ohio
Parole Board on March 2 interviewed Wiles via video-conference from
the Chillicothe Correctional Institution, after which arguments in
support of and in opposition to clemency were presented. The board
voted 8-0 against recommending clemency.
Ohio was subjected to a
moratorium on executions from November of 2011 until April 4, 2012,
when U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost of Newark lifted the
moratorium he invoked for the state’s inability to follow its own execution
protocol. The moratorium was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court
in February.
CityBeat reported here
that despite lifting the moratorium, Frost expressed frustration with
the state’s problems carrying out executions, despite the errors
being largely minor paperwork technicalities, including “not
properly documenting that an inmate’s medical files were reviewed
and switching the official whose job it was to announce the start and
finish times of the lethal injection.”
From CityBeat’s
Politics/Issues blog April 6:
Since the
moratorium, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction has
allegedly scrutinized its procedural policies and implemented a new
"Incident Command System," which sounds like an initiative
for ORDC Director Gary Mohr to more closely micromanage the processes
during state executions. "This court is therefore
willing to trust Ohio just enough to permit the scheduled execution,"
Frost wrote regarding his rejection of Wiles' stay of execution. "The
court reaches this conclusion with some trepidation given Ohio's
history of telling this court what (they) think they need to say in
order to conduct executions and then not following through on
promised reforms."
To date, Ohio has executed 386 convicted murderers. Click here for a schedule of upcoming executions in Ohio and here for recent clemency reports.