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.
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 had a moratorium on executions from November 2011 until April 4, 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 U.S. Supreme Court upheld the moratorium in February.
Despite lifting the moratorium, Frost expressed frustration with the state’s problems carrying out executions, including not properly documenting the review of an inmate’s medical files and switching the official whose job it was to announce the start and finish of the lethal injection.
Since the moratorium, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction says it has scrutinized its procedural policies and implemented a new “Incident Command System.”
“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.
