BONUS | The Death Penalty

Richard Beasley sits on Ohio's death row, a man who in the eyes of former DA Paul Scarsella, got exactly what he deserved.

Some folks just need killing. There's just no way around it. I mean, some folks just need killing Beasley. I wanted on death row. He deserved to be on death row. There was never really a plea offer to Beasley. He deserved to be on the row. You killed this many people in the manner in which you did it. That's what the death penalty was designed for, and if the jury found that it was appropriate, then that's what was going to happen.

Scarsella insists some people are evil and Beasley, who used God and a Craigslist ad to reel in his victims is one of them.

David, Tim, Scott. They were just ways to make money, ways to get a couple of bucks in his pocket so that he didn't have to go back to Texas. It was just that calculation of, I'm going to take a life, I'm going to leave them somewhere where their family is never going to find them solely for my benefit. That to me, is the definition of evil.

Most Americans, about 60% say they support the death penalty for people convicted of murder. But here's the reality: 24 states have banned capital punishment outright, and the states where it's still legal, it's used sparingly. That may not last because some leaders at the highest levels are pushing for its return and pushing hard.

If somebody kills somebody in the Capitol, Washington DC, we're going to be seeking the death penalty, and that's a very strong preventative.

President Trump has directed the Justice Department to pursue the death penalty wherever possible, and we're already seeing that play out. Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against the young man accused of murdering a united healthcare CEO. It's the first time since 2021 that the federal government has moved forward with a death penalty case under the Trump administration. Meanwhile, in Utah, prosecutors say they will pursue the death penalty against the man charged with killing conservative activists. Charlie Kirk. It's hard, maybe even impossible to talk about the death penalty without emotion, but we have to try because it's complicated and at the heart of it, no matter how you parse it, the death penalty is the state killing another human being, no matter how evil we believe that person to be. I'm Carol Costello. This is a God Hook bonus episode:The Death Penalty. We promised you a deep dive on the death penalty, and here it is. We're going to look at it from every angle.

I have banged the drum since the very beginning of this is that people just need to be very educated as to how cases like this get to be where they are, how they're charged, who's in charge of indicting these cases, why voting is important.

That's Emily Pelphrey, my partner. She's prosecuted death penalty cases, including Richard Beasley's. She doesn't just know about capital punishment. She's lived it in court. I just wondered if you felt weird talking about the death penalty.

I think to be painted into one corner, either your pro or con death penalty is a very hard thing to do. I think most people probably exist someplace in the middle. I think it's just really important that people understand how it works and why it's important to educate yourself about what the death penalty truly is. Do you believe that Richard Beasley will ever be put to death?

I do not. So right now in the state of Ohio, there's no one that is actually going into the execution chamber, if you'll call it. There's a moratorium right now on the drugs coming in that are used for lethal injection. So I think as of this point, everyone's just going to sit there and it seems to be the way, or at least it was, that a lot of the death penalty cases were just simply going to end up his life without parole cases.

So did you know that at trial that there was a chance that even if you got the jury to decide on death for Richard Beasley that he may never be executed?

There's that possibility. We talked about it in the state of Ohio, if you are tried with a death penalty case, you get an automatic appeal. So right off the bat that the case is going to hang in appeals for a while, which it should. This is the harshest of penalties. So you should have every single eye review that everything was done properly.

As Ohio's Republican Attorney General told the Ohio Capital Journal, the death penalty system is broken, enormously expensive and so sluggish that inmates are more likely to die of suicide or natural causes than execution. But he's not wrong with it being

Expensive. So that's why in the Beasley case, the case was transferred from Noble County up to Summit County because Noble County would not have had the funds to pay for everything needed for the death penalty. So the number of people that are called in for jury duty is immense. I mean, again, we sat at the Akron Civic Theater to go through jury. Is it slow? Yes, but in fairness, it kind of does need to be slow, at least from the trial phase because you need to make sure that you are going through all of the proper motions. If there's a suppression issue, you need to hear that. If there's an issue with DNA or forensics that needs evaluated before the jury, you need to take the time to do that. So the idea that you need to rush along a death penalty in itself, I think is just ridiculous. These are the cases that need the most attention and the most litigation.

Yeah, because there ain't no going back, right?

You can't undead somebody.

No. The biggest hurdle in Ohio is its current method of execution. The three drug cocktail, the first drug sedates, the second paralyzes, and the third stops the heart. But there's no way to know if someone is truly unconscious or quietly suffering. Pharmaceutical companies won't supply the drugs, and many doctors refuse to participate. The result is a system struggling to function with serious medical, legal, and moral questions hanging over every execution. Of course, there are people who aren't overly concerned about any of that. They or their loved ones suffered unimaginable pain too. You have the victims in these cases, especially

Scott Davis on the Beasley case, and he wanted to be there. He was ready to be their front row and center to watch the execution. He's someone that survived it and actually lived that experience. So I don't want to judge what he believes is the right thing or not, but there are people that really believe that this is what should happen. I'm sure he wouldn't be like, oh, the drugs don't work on him. He's going to feel pain. Scott wouldn't care. He'd be like, all right, that's fine.

That tension justice for victims versus the humanity of the person being executed is something our producer Chris has thought a lot about.

That's another debate within this whole larger debate is there's people who say, who cares if the people who are being executed suffer? But then there's the other side of that says, no, that's also wrong.

That tension is at the heart of the eighth Amendment. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted for that reason. Ohio's governor Mike DeWine said lethal injection was no longer an option after a federal judge found it could inflict severe pain and unnecessary suffering. Those who support the death penalty are not happy with the governor.

You have to understand that. Governor DeWine, former Attorney General DeWine, former prosecuting attorney DeWine, former Senator DeWine, he's been around for a long time. He's always had a very pro-life stance.

Insiders believe DeWine is passionately pro-life and passionately anti-death penalty. And while he speaks openly about the first for political reasons, he cannot publicly acknowledge the second, I just want to be clear, governor DeWine is pro-life. He's also Republican. Correct. And in this climate, you have to be sort of Trumpian to be successful as a Republican politician.

If you don't have the ability to follow through with the tools necessary for the execution, it's not on your hands.

So Governor DeWine is having his cake and eating it too because he can now be comfortable in his beliefs as a pro-life person, knowing that if he institutes this moratorium, that no one will ever die on death row on his

Watch. In my opinion, from the interactions and putting all the disclaimers on that I need to, I think that if anything, it shows that he's truly consistent in his pro-life belief,

Politics, color, everything including the death penalty, hence that push to expand the death penalty even as it stalled in much of the country. Right now, 23 states have abolished it and six more aren't carrying out executions, mostly due to drug shortages. That means nearly half the country isn't executing anyone. There are some striking exceptions. South Carolina used a firing squad to execute two inmates. Alabama executed a man using nitrogen hypoxia, forcing him to inhale pure nitrogen until he suffocated. According to the ACL U, the state promised a quick painless death. Instead, witnesses saw the inmate shake, convulse and gasp for minutes. No one really knows how long it took for that man to die. In 2009, Ohio Executioners tried to kill a man named Ramel Broom who'd raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl. ML'S name is now infamous. He was the man who survived his own execution. On September 15th of that year, the state of Ohio tried to put him to death by lethal ejection for more than two hours execution. Staff jabbed him again and again. At one point a needle even struck a bone. They never found a usable vein and Ramel broom walked out of the death chamber alive. Last year, I taught a podcast class at Loyola Marymount University in California. A former student of mine, his name is Luke, talked to a man whose brother was on death row at that time and knew Romel Broom.

He said when they took Romel broom away to execute him, I mean, everybody was in awe. But what really stunned him is when they brought him back, everybody thought they had saw a ghost because you don't come back from the death chamber alive.

That's right. When the combination of lethal drugs did not kill Bome guards brought him back to his cell on death row. It was the only time anyone on death row was allowed to touch another inmate,

One of the guards let him out. He went up and hugged Roel brooms, and one other guy went up and hugged Ramel brooms. He says, man, you got to be a godsend. And do you know the governor, which was Ted Strickland? He said, spare my brother's life. He spare Ramel broom's life.

Romel broom's survival became a turning point, a reminder of just how dangerous and fallible America's chosen method of execution can be still, president Trump wants to implement the death penalty wherever possible, even though 23 states and the District of Columbia have banned the death penalty for local crimes decades ago. Well, he's saying if somebody kills someone in the Capitol, we're going to be seeking the death penalty. And he says, that's a very strong preventative.

It's not a deterrent. I don't know that it's been proven to be a deterrent. And just to say that because someone murders another person, again, I'm not advocating murder, but not every murder deserves to be indicted as a death penalty case. Let's say that there is a woman who lives in DC and is the victim of domestic violence and murders, her husband or partner or whomever. Is that going to be a death penalty case? I mean, it's just so ridiculous of a statement to even make, and it just shows that statements can be thrown out. And so people will hear that and they'll think, well, sure. He said, this is what can happen. So it's what can happen. But they're not taking time to educate themselves as to the reality of these kinds of cases. So what are the parameters for a capital case? I mean, so there are a number of different kinds, and without having the Ohio revised code in front of me, the one that we focused on,

I can't believe you don't have that with

You, aren't you? I mean, I did have a pocket constitution for a while, but the things that we focused on in this case in particular were the homicides occurred during the commission of a kidnapping that there were multiple victims. So if I was to see a case where there's just such depravity in luring people in, there was such a plan and it was so calculated and there were so many people involved. Or the other soft spot obviously that I have, it's like if you killed a kid during the commission of a rape or something super violent. I'm sorry, I can't wrap my head around that kind of case either.

In short, a jury can only impose the death penalty if the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors. Aggravating factors are what make the crime of murder, especially egregious like kidnapping or robbery. Mitigating factors are the circumstances that might argue for leniency, like being young, having little criminal background or playing only a minor role at the crime. How much say did the victim's families have and whether the state decides to pursue the death penalty? Like in the Beasley case, did the families want the death penalty?

I think that for the most part, they did. And there's always a certain voice that you give victims in cases, and I felt that at the time of prosecution, whenever I was doing my cases, it was up to us to best educate the families or the people related to the victims so that they understood what we were doing. So you would have people coming into different trials that would say, let's say in a child rape case, a young child being raped, you would certainly say, I want that person to die. However, that's not the law. So that's not something that could happen. So then you have to counsel the families into understanding what it is that they can or cannot expect out of trial. The victims don't run the decision making. They can certainly weigh in and give their, I've always felt that if you involve the families from the get go and help them understand the process, that they're at least more comfortable in discussing what's going on. I've certainly had families that did not agree with the death penalty, but they understood that that's the law, and if certain conditions are made, it's not up for us to judge. This is truly the decision of the jurors and the

Judge, Paul said something during our, I think it was the ninth episode or it could be the 10th episode. He said that some people are truly evil and we need to talk about that, and we don't talk about that. And he says, we should. If you talk to people who run the innocence projects across the country who find people who are wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, they would say that calling someone evil is the very worst thing you can do because that makes you more prone to mistakes. What do you think, Emily?

It's a hard thing to say that someone is truly born evil or not. So I'll challenge Ted Bundy. Was he someone who just had a bad day or was picked on when he was little, or was he born that way? I mean, you never know if someone is truly born that way, right? So it's the whole nature versus nurture.

What Emily liked about Paul though is that he never started diving into a case by saying, this person is evil.

It always came down to what are the facts and what is the evidence that we can prove in court?

I mean, I understand what you're saying, that you go by the book and if the case qualifies to be a death penalty case, that's what you do because you're doing your job. I totally get all that. But I do also think that you guys are human beings with

Emotions. So again, I think this is where we try to understand how someone can commit a crime, and we're not in that mindset and never will be where we can understand why someone does something. I say, someone who cuts me off in traffic is evil. I think the word is used very loosely a lot of times. So I would take that into consideration too. And who's saying that people are truly born evil? Are they trying to be? Are these people that are promoting capital murder? Are they people that are promoting the death penalty? But I think that you have to try to pull out any kind of emotion when you're dealing with these cases, and it is very hard. It's incredibly hard.

All of what we just talked about is a fairly clinical look at the death penalty, the legal system, the execution methods, the politics. But we haven't really touched on the moral and religious arguments against capital punish. That's coming up at our next bonus episode, the cost of innocence.

I used to think it was Americans and it's not Americans, Christians, because the church could step up at any time. You've never heard the church step up and say, Hey, this is wrong. We've been teaching. Thou shall not kill. So if you're teaching thou shallal not kill, how can you stand by and allow killing to happen and still allow these same politicians to come to church and serve with you on Sunday to an executed savior?

Thanks for listening with open Minds. It's a tough topic, but one we ought to explore.