COLUMBUS — The line for Ohio’s death house is now more than three years long.
The state Supreme Court voted 6-1 Monday to schedule three executions, including one for Douglas Lamont Coley, 39, for the 1997 carjacking killing of Samar El-Okdi, 21, of Toledo.
Coley’s lethal injection is set for March 14, 2018, at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. Executions are backed up because of a moratorium that prohibits any execution through the end of 2015 because of Ohio’s struggles to find the drugs to carry them out and questions about the process pending in the courts.
The high court’s sole negative vote came from Justice William O’Neill, the bench’s only Democrat. He believes Ohio’s death penalty is unconstitutional.
Coley and Joseph Green, 36, were convicted in the Jan. 3, 1997, slaying of Ms. El-Okdi, one of two carjacking cases in which the victims were abducted near their homes in Toledo’s Old West End, shot, and left to die. The first victim, David Moore, was shot five times 11 days earlier, but he survived and helped link the pair to Ms. El-Okdi’s death.
Green had been sentenced to death too, but, after his case was sent back to Lucas County on a technicality, a three-judge panel substituted a life sentence because the judges weren’t convinced he held the gun that killed Ms. El-Okdi.
Coley is on death row at Chillicothe Correctional Institution. Green is serving his life sentence at Toledo Correctional Institution.
Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates requested the setting of an execution date for Coley, noting he has exhausted all available state and federal appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in 2013.
Ohio has not carried out an execution since January, 2014, after witnesses described Dennis McGuire, of Montgomery County, as struggling against his restraints and making choking sounds after the drugs began to flow.
The state since has announced that the two-drug cocktail used to kill McGuire — intravenous overdoses of the powerful barbiturate midazolam and the narcotic painkiller hydromorphone — would not be used a second time. Midazolam is at the heart of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court after its use in a botched Oklahoma execution last year.
Ohio’s new protocol involves a single overdose of either pentobarbital, a powerful sedative, or thiopental sodium, a short-acting barbiturate. That assumes the state can find the drugs. Their European manufacturers have refused to make the drugs available for executions.
In addition to Coley, two other northwest Ohioans are in the execution queue.
William Montgomery, convicted in the 1986 murders of two Toledo roommates, is set to die Aug. 15, 2016.
Cleveland R. Jackson’s execution is scheduled for July 20, 2016. He is one of two men who opened fire on eight people cornered in a Lima apartment kitchen in 2002, killing two girls ages 3 and 17.
Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.
First Published May 5, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
