Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said on Tuesday that his state should abolish the death penalty, the culmination of a gradual but stark reversal in stance and a marked split from his fellow Republicans, who broadly support executions.
Mr. DeWine, who is term-limited, helped restore the death penalty in Ohio after a brief pause decades ago, but has repeatedly postponed executions as governor. Nationwide, the number of executions has swiftly declined as access to lethal injection drugs decreases and courtroom battles over other methods of capital punishment play out.
“The moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists,” Mr. DeWine said during a news conference on Tuesday, adding that the death penalty was ineffective as a deterrent of violent crime.
According to the governor, executions have become exceedingly rare in Ohio: Courts are handing out fewer death sentences, while wait times for executions are increasing, he said.
A 1981 law cosponsored by Mr. DeWine, then a state senator, reinstated the death penalty in Ohio less than a decade after a landmark Supreme Court ruling. But fewer than a fifth of all people sentenced to death in the state since then have been executed, he said on Tuesday.
The wait time for executions in Ohio can exceed two decades, the governor said. In the interim, dozens of inmates have died of natural causes or suicide, and 89 have been removed from death row by court decisions, he said.
Meanwhile, the number of death sentences handed out by courts statewide has dropped precipitously: In the last six years, just two people have been sentenced to death in Ohio, Mr. DeWine said on Tuesday.
“I no longer believe the death penalty is a deterrent for murder,” he said, adding that the practice had also taken a toll on the mental health of employees who carry out executions.
Mr. DeWine’s denouncement of the death penalty places him squarely at odds with the president — and party leaders in his state.
Just hours into his second term, President Trump directed his incoming attorney general to ensure that states had enough lethal injection drugs to perform executions, calling capital punishment an “essential tool” in an executive order.
In February, Ohio’s House speaker, Matt Huffman, said that he would “vigorously oppose” getting rid of the state’s death penalty. Mr. Huffman, a Republican, could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Attempts to repeal the death penalty in Ohio have repeatedly stalled, including a recent bipartisan push in the State Legislature. The governor’s backing could be a “marker in the sand” that inches the state closer to ending capital punishment, said Kevin Werner, executive director of Ohioans to Stop Executions, an advocacy group.
“Governor DeWine has said the things out loud that so many conservatives have raised to us privately,” Mr. Werner said.
Mr. DeWine’s rejection of the death penalty comes at an inflection point: Next month is the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that reinstated the constitutionality of capital punishment.
Yet since the ruling, a number of states have moved to abolish the death penalty, including several within the last decade. In all, 23 states and Washington, D.C., prohibit it.
Executions have been on a general decline for more than two decades across the United States, particularly as drugs used for lethal injections — one common method — have become more difficult to obtain. Some pharmaceutical companies have restricted the use of their drugs in executions.
Still, Republicans broadly support capital punishment in general: 82 percent of those surveyed in an October 2025 poll favored the policy, compared with only 32 percent of Democrats. Ohio Republicans have backed a bill that would legalize nitrogen gas executions, an alternative method that other states have increasingly turned to as access to lethal injection drugs tightens.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court blocked Alabama — the first state to use nitrogen gas in executions — from putting an inmate to death with the gas, setting up a potential broader courtroom battle over its legality.
Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Law Center, an advocacy group that supports the death penalty, said that the policy is “presently not effective” in Ohio, but he maintained the solution was to reform, rather than repeal, the law.
“If the death penalty is an empty threat, then it does not have much — if any — effect,” he said, referring to Mr. DeWine’s postponement of several executions. An inmate was last put to death in Ohio in 2018; Mr. DeWine took office the following year.
“It’s not effective because of a failure of leadership,” he added.
Thirty executions are scheduled in Ohio from January 2027 through October 2029, all under the next governor’s term, with 109 inmates on death row, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. If the death penalty is repealed during Mr. DeWine’s remaining months in office, those inmates would most likely face sentences of life without parole — “sometimes coined the other death penalty,” Mr. Werner said.
“The Legislature can take this action, and I believe they should take this action,” Mr. DeWine said on Tuesday.
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