Two things happened in the same week that together capture everything complicated and urgent about the state of capital punishment in America in 2026. In Columbus, Ohio, Republican Governor Mike DeWine stood before reporters, brought out charts and graphs, and announced that he now believes the death penalty should be abolished. He is 79 years old. He helped write Ohio’s death penalty law 45 years ago. He spent five decades as a county prosecutor, a member of Congress, a state attorney general, and a governor defending capital punishment in various forms — and he has concluded, on the basis of evidence and conscience, that he was wrong. In Tallahassee, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed another death warrant. An 80-year-old man convicted in 1986 is scheduled to be executed at the end of July.
These two events are happening in the same country, in the same moment, and they tell the same story about capital punishment from opposite ends: a system that is being abandoned by the people who built it at the same moment it is being accelerated by the people who still believe in it.
At Sustainable Action Now, we cover the death penalty because we believe that state-sanctioned killing is one of the most serious moral and legal questions a society can face, and that the evidence about how capital punishment actually functions — who it kills, whether it deters, what it costs, and whether it serves any of the purposes its defenders claim for it — demands engagement from anyone who cares about justice, dignity, and the proper limits of government power. This week produced more of that evidence than usual. Here is what you need to know.
Mike DeWine and Fifty Years of Changing His Mind
On June 16, 2026, Mike DeWine walked to a podium in Columbus and did something that almost no Republican governor in the modern era has done: he publicly, explicitly, and without hedging called for his state to abolish the death penalty. He brought data. He brought the intellectual honesty to say that the justification he once had no longer exists. And he did it in the final months of a term-limited governorship, without any political incentive to soften the statement or qualify his position for future electoral purposes.
The statement DeWine made at that news conference deserves to be understood in the context of the position he started from. This is not a man who was always skeptical of capital punishment and gradually found the courage to say so. In 1981, as a state senator, DeWine co-sponsored the legislation that reinstated Ohio’s death penalty after the Supreme Court had previously struck it down. In Congress, he voted to expand the federal crimes punishable by death and to accelerate the execution process. As Ohio’s attorney general, he defended the state’s capital punishment statute in court and secured capital indictments in murder cases. He has spent the majority of his adult life in one of the most pro-death-penalty positions available to a public official in American government.
What changed, over the course of seven years as governor and fifty years of observing the system from inside it, was his assessment of the evidence on deterrence. DeWine has been clear that his moral justification for the death penalty was always conditional: he supported state killing because he believed it could deter violent crime. That was the argument he made to himself. That was the basis on which he co-wrote the 1981 law. That was the foundation of his support through decades of prosecutorial and legislative work.
The data, he says, no longer supports that foundation. During his news conference, DeWine presented charts showing the steady decline in death sentences handed down by courts, the sharp reduction in actual executions carried out, and the dramatic lengthening of the time between sentencing and execution — now measured in decades rather than years. He showed that the odds of a condemned person actually being executed have decreased in every successive decade since Ohio reinstated capital punishment. Condemned people increasingly die of natural causes or by suicide before their execution dates arrive. The legal appeals process has stretched so long that the threat of execution has become, for most practical purposes, a remote abstraction rather than a near-term consequence of any crime.
“Even if the murderer is caught, indicted, convicted and sentenced to death,” DeWine said, “the odds are still pretty good they’re not going to be executed.” He went further: if the deterrent argument is the moral justification for state killing, and the empirical evidence shows that the deterrent is not functioning, then the moral justification is gone. “The moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.”
That sentence should be read carefully. DeWine is not saying he changed his mind because his sympathies shifted. He is not saying he became sentimental about criminals. He is saying that the factual predicate for a consequentialist defense of the death penalty has collapsed, and that intellectual honesty requires acknowledging it. For a man who spent his career on the prosecutorial and legislative side of this issue, that is a genuinely significant statement.
The week before his public announcement, DeWine had quietly done something else: he commuted the death sentence of Gregory Lott, a 64-year-old man who has been on Ohio’s death row since 1987. Lott was convicted of setting an 82-year-old East Cleveland man on fire during a burglary in 1986. In 2020, Ohio’s Parole Board voted 6 to 2 in favor of granting him clemency, noting documented evidence of intellectual disability that the Supreme Court had ruled, in Atkins v. Virginia, makes a defendant ineligible for the death penalty. By the time the courts finished processing that claim — after multiple postponements, after the prosecution withdrew its opposition, after nearly a quarter century of legal battle — Lott had faced four execution dates and been reprieved from each one. DeWine’s commutation, converting his sentence to life without parole, ended the legal ordeal for a man who should never have been eligible for execution under the law the Supreme Court had already established.
The commutation and the public abolition call are two parts of the same recognition. The machinery of Ohio’s death penalty has been consuming enormous resources of time, money, legal effort, and human anguish — from the families of victims who have spent decades waiting for an execution that may never come, from state employees on execution teams whose mental health toll DeWine explicitly acknowledged, and from condemned people like Lott who have faced their own death dates repeatedly over decades. The governor has concluded that this machinery is not producing the public safety benefit that justifies those costs. Ohio has not executed anyone since July 2018. There are more than 100 people on Ohio’s death row, with 30 executions nominally scheduled over the next four years. None of them will be carried out during DeWine’s tenure.
He has called on the legislature to act — either by passing one of the two bipartisan abolition bills currently pending in the Ohio statehouse, or by putting the question to Ohio voters through a ballot initiative. Polling shows 60 percent of Ohio residents support ending the death penalty. Republican House Speaker Matt Huffman has stated he will vigorously oppose repeal. The outcome in the legislature is uncertain. But the conversation DeWine has opened, and the political space he has created for other Republican officials to question capital punishment without abandoning their identity as conservatives, may prove more durable than any single legislative outcome.
Why DeWine’s Position Matters Beyond Ohio
A Republican governor calling for abolition is not simply news within Ohio. It is a data point in a larger pattern that has significant implications for the national trajectory of capital punishment.
The death penalty in America has been on a long, slow statistical decline for decades. The number of executions carried out nationally peaked in 1999 at 98 and has been declining almost every year since. The number of new death sentences handed down by juries has fallen dramatically from its 1990s peak. The number of states with active death penalty statutes has been shrinking. New Hampshire abolished capital punishment in 2019. Colorado did so in 2020. Virginia — once a state that executed people at one of the highest rates in the country — abolished it in 2021. Several other states have instituted de facto moratoriums through executive action.
What is new about the current moment is that this movement is no longer exclusively associated with liberal or progressive politics. DeWine is a conservative Republican. He frames his opposition to the death penalty in the language of evidence, efficiency, and cost-benefit analysis rather than in the language of progressive values. He is not alone. Organizations like Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty have been documenting the growing number of Republican officials, prosecutors, and conservatives who have concluded that capital punishment is incompatible with conservative principles — that it is fiscally irresponsible given the enormous cost of capital litigation, that it creates the risk of executing innocent people that no government should be willing to accept, and that it represents an exercise of state power so irreversible and so consequential that it demands a level of certainty the criminal justice system cannot consistently provide.
The innocence issue is perhaps the most powerful argument in the conservative critique of the death penalty. Since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the United States in 1976, more than 190 people who had been sentenced to death have been exonerated — found to be innocent, often through DNA evidence that was not available at the time of their conviction. Each one of those exonerations represents a case in which the system would have executed an innocent person if not for the continued availability of post-conviction review. Each one represents a near-miss with state-sanctioned murder of an innocent person. The question that DeWine and other conservatives who have turned against the death penalty are effectively asking is: how many near-misses are acceptable, and what is the right answer to the question of what happens when the near-miss fails to happen in time?
Florida’s Acceleration: The Other Side of the American Death Penalty in 2026
While Ohio is moving toward abolition, Florida is moving in the opposite direction — and at a pace that advocates describe as unlike anything they have previously encountered.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed another death warrant in the week that Governor DeWine made his abolition announcement. Eighty-year-old Dominick Occhicone is scheduled to be executed on July 28. He was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1986 murder of Martha Artzner in Pasco County. The jury vote at the time of his sentencing was 7 to 5 — a recommendation, not a unanimous verdict, for the death penalty. He also received a life sentence in connection with the death of Raymond Artzner.
The circumstances of Occhicone’s case reflect several of the most persistent concerns that death penalty abolitionists raise about how capital punishment is actually applied. A 7 to 5 jury recommendation for death — with five jurors voting against — is not the kind of near-universal consensus that most people imagine when they think about capital punishment being reserved for the worst of the worst cases. He has now spent four decades on death row, aging from the age when he committed the crime to the age of 80 — older than many people live to be even in comfortable circumstances, let alone in prison. His execution, if carried out, will remove from the world an 80-year-old man.
We grieve for Martha and Raymond Artzner. We grieve for everyone who has carried the weight of their deaths for forty years. Nothing about this situation — not an execution, not a commutation, not any other outcome the legal system can produce — can undo that loss or restore what was taken. The families of murder victims deserve acknowledgment, support, and a justice system that takes their suffering seriously. That acknowledgment is not incompatible with the observation that executing an 80-year-old man who has spent four decades in prison does not make the community safer, does not deter future violence, and does not serve any of the purposes that the strongest defenders of the death penalty claim for it.
The week also brought news of the execution of Lance Corporal Dusty Ray Spencer, who served in the United States Marine Corps. He was 74 years old at the time of his execution. Those who knew him described a man who was deeply remorseful for the harm he had caused, who had grown and changed across the decades he spent on death row, and who died as someone genuinely different from the person who committed the crime for which he was convicted. His own words, written from death watch in the final days before his execution and shared with a spiritual advisor, captured the human complexity of a man who was both accountable for serious harm and fully, irreversibly human in his own right. Florida Abolitionists for Death Penalty continues to share his story and his words as a testament to what the state extinguished.
Dennis Sochor, another elderly veteran, is scheduled for execution on July 14 in Florida. Advocates are already organizing vigils and calling on community members to make contact with decision-makers before that date.
Florida’s pace of executions in 2026 has been unprecedented by recent historical standards, and the Florida Abolitionists for Death Penalty team — a small organization by the standards of national advocacy — is working to respond to each death warrant as it is issued while simultaneously building the grassroots infrastructure that long-term change requires. Their work includes organizing statewide vigils, supporting the families of the condemned, educating lawmakers and the public about the documented failures of the death penalty system, and maintaining the kind of persistent public presence that prevents executions from becoming normalized events that pass without notice.
The Evidence That Both Governors Are Responding To
What connects the divergent actions of DeWine and DeSantis is that they are both, in their different ways, responding to the same body of evidence about capital punishment in America — and reaching opposite conclusions about what that evidence requires.
The evidence is not ambiguous. Capital punishment in America has not been shown to deter violent crime. The most rigorous studies of the relationship between execution rates and murder rates find no consistent deterrent effect. The National Research Council of the National Academies reached this conclusion definitively in 2012, finding that existing studies were fundamentally flawed and that there was no reliable evidence that the death penalty reduced homicide rates. The states that have abolished the death penalty have not experienced increases in murder rates relative to states that retain it.
The innocence problem is real and documented. The risk of executing an innocent person is not theoretical in a system where more than 190 people sentenced to death have been subsequently exonerated. The costs of capital litigation — which includes the mandatory appeals process that exists precisely because of the irreversibility of execution — are substantially higher than the costs of life imprisonment. The racial and geographic disparities in who receives the death penalty are well-documented and reflect the same systemic inequities that run through every other aspect of the criminal legal system.
The human cost to everyone involved in the process — the families of victims who endure decades of legal proceedings rather than a resolution, the families of the condemned who live for years in the shadow of a scheduled execution, the prison staff who participate in the execution process and carry documented long-term psychological consequences from it — is real and largely invisible in public discussions of the death penalty that focus exclusively on the abstract question of whether it is a just punishment.
DeWine weighed this evidence and concluded that the death penalty fails on its own terms. DeSantis has concluded that none of it is sufficient to override the value of retribution and state authority. The divergence between these two Republican governors illustrates that the debate within conservative politics about capital punishment is genuine and unresolved — and that the conservative case against the death penalty has reached a point where it can no longer be dismissed as a progressive concern that conservatives should reflexively oppose.
The Legal Landscape and the People Fighting Within It
The death penalty advocacy ecosystem includes some of the most dedicated and experienced civil rights lawyers and advocates in the country, and their work deserves recognition as the fight in Ohio, Florida, and every other active capital punishment state continues.
The ACLU of Northern California’s Criminal Justice Program, led by Deputy Director Avi Frey, has been challenging capital punishment on racial justice, constitutional, and sentencing grounds across a range of cases. Frey’s work has included challenging the extreme sentencing of young people, fighting death sentences, and pushing back against the conditions of solitary confinement that define life on death row for most of the people awaiting execution.
Jess Oats, Director of Systemic Litigation at the California Office of the State Public Defender, has represented death-sentenced clients since 2015 and brings more than two decades of capital defense experience across Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana — states that have represented some of the most aggressive applications of capital punishment in the country. Her career began at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and has included cases at every level of the post-conviction process.
Robert Bacon has practiced capital defense in California since 1990, representing clients under death sentences while simultaneously working on systemic criminal justice reform. His three-plus decades of capital litigation represent the kind of sustained, individual commitment that makes the legal infrastructure of capital defense possible.
These are the people who show up in courtrooms and clemency proceedings, who write briefs at two in the morning for execution dates that may arrive with little notice, who carry the specific human stories of the people on death row into the legal proceedings that determine whether they live or die. They work within a system that Governor DeWine has now concluded should not exist in the form that requires them to do this work. Whether Ohio’s legislature agrees, and whether Florida’s governor is ever persuaded by the same evidence that changed DeWine’s mind, are questions whose answers are not yet written.
What This Moment Requires
The death penalty in America in 2026 is a system under simultaneous expansion and contraction — more executions in Florida than we have seen in years, genuine momentum toward abolition in Ohio and potentially in the states that take their cues from a Republican governor willing to say what the evidence demands. Both of these things are true at once, and the resolution of that tension will be determined by the political choices made in legislatures, by the legal arguments made in courtrooms, by the advocacy done by organizations like Florida Abolitionists for Death Penalty and Death Penalty Focus, and by the degree to which the public understands what capital punishment actually is and how it actually functions.
The time Mike DeWine described — the time to do what is right — is always right. The question is always who has the courage to say so.
Sign the petition for Dominick Occhicone. Attend or host a vigil for Dennis Sochor before July 14. Support the organizations doing this work in Florida and Ohio and everywhere else the state is still in the business of killing people in the name of justice. And do not let the executions become normalized — because the moment any act of state power this final becomes routine is the moment that accountability for it disappears.
Sustainable Action Now will continue covering capital punishment, criminal justice reform, and the legal and advocacy landscape surrounding the death penalty in the United States.
