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Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
Gambling On Justice Wed, Sep. 14, 2005 Justice is a concept that shouldn’t resemble a game of craps. Yet the death penalty requires a government to be irrefutably accurate in a task that is indisputably irreversible. It can’t, which is why death penalty stories capture our attention, especially when guilt isn’t as clear as it must be. Take the case of John Spirko, who was convicted of killing a Van Wert County postmaster. Gov. Bob Taft of Ohio put Spirko’s death sentence on hold for two months last week while the state tries to figure out whether one of its top prosecutors misled the Ohio Parole Board during a clemency hearing. Spirko, 59, was sentenced to die for the 1982 kidnapping and murder of Betty Jane Mottinger from the post office in Elgin. On Aug. 30, the parole board voted 6-3 that Taft shouldn’t grant Spirko a delay or pardon. Days later, in a stunning turn, the board changed its position because of questions raised by the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the case presented by Senior Deputy Attorney General Tim Prichard. The paper said Prichard “made false statements about important facts” and “mischaracterized evidence regarding what Spirko knew about the murder, and regarding Spirko’s whereabouts” the day of the murder. Prichard’s conduct punctuates reported problems with Spirko’s arrest, trial and conviction. The Plain Dealer raised troubling issues concerning the reliability of key witnesses in a series of articles earlier this year. And while Mottinger’s family needs and deserves justice, the case against Spirko is clouded with too much doubt and suspicion. “I think that this is one of the weakest death-penalty cases I’ve ever seen in terms of the evidence of a defendant’s guilt,” Steven Drizin, legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, told the Plain Dealer. Drizin spoke on Spirko’s behalf at the first clemency hearing. And just when you thought Spirko’s case couldn’t be weighed down by more issues, the Associated Press, in reviewing his case, found that Spirko faces execution despite the fact that dozens of other killers charged the same year with similar or worse crimes under Ohio law do not. This fact doesn’t excuse murder but indicts the arbitrary nature of the death penalty. There are more than enough data to show that race and socio-economic class of both the defendant and the victim play a role in who gets sent to death row and who doesn’t in Ohio, Indiana and other death penalty states. Although he commuted one death row inmate’s sentence to life in prison without parole in his two terms in office, Taft has never delayed an execution – until Spirko’s. He had to delay the execution given Prichard’s disturbing display of prosecutorial hubris at the clemency hearing. Clearly, Spirko’s case is another sign that the death penalty is an unjustifiable crap shoot. There’s something horribly wrong with doling out death sentences in that kind of environment.
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