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.
