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Dayton Daily News Taft Duty Unchanged In Spirko Death Case
EDITORIAL
The 60-Day reprieve requested by Attorney General Jim Petro and granted to inmate John Spirko by Gov. Bob Taft seems to show careful flexibility in how the death penalty is administered. The reprieve was a welcome step, given the alternative. But what it most reveals are serious problems in how Ohio officials review death penalty cases — how the closest scrutiny seems to come at the very last minute, and in response to national attention, which Mr. Spirko's case is receiving. Thus, the reprieve should not be seen by Gov. Taft as evidence of a system that works. To the contrary, it should confirm the need to grant clemency and to commute the death penalty to a life sentence for a criminal conviction that's irredeemably flawed. This marks the second reprieve Mr. Spirko has received in recent months. Attorney General Petro asked that the execution be delayed just days before a September execution date so the state parole board — which had already issued its report recommending against clemency — could hold a new hearing. The need for a rehearing was prompted by a detailed report in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer about how the attorney general's office had misstated facts during the original clemency hearing. The second delay only came late Monday afternoon — more than 20 years after Mr. Spirko was convicted of murdering Betty Jane Mottinger, and less than eight days before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection. It will enable the state crime lab to perform DNA and fingerprint testing of various pieces of physical evidence collected during the investigation of the Mottinger's murder in 1982. The tests have been sought by Mr. Spirko's lawyers to help prove what they claim to be his innocence. The specific purpose is to see whether scientific evidence connects the crime to another suspect — one wholly unrelated to Mr. Spirko who a state investigator brought to the attention of the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in 1997. Neither federal agency followed up. The Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School acted where law enforcement officials failed to. Last month, it had a polygraph test performed on the original tipster. The results showed he did not act deceptively when providing information about the other suspect in the Mottinger murder. Only then did Mr. Petro agree to have the crime scene evidence tested. The new tests may not prove anything conclusively. But some things will remain clear even amid the system's last-minute lurchings: If Gov. Taft is genuinely dedicated to avoiding wrongful execution — rather than just appearances of due process — he will not allow the Spirko execution to go forward.
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