In my more than four decades as a law professor, I have studied issues of fairness in our criminal justice system, particularly in the area of the death penalty. Thus I was struck by a question that a juror who served Ray Tibbetts’ capital trial, Ross Allen Geiger, posed in a letter to Gov. John Kasich:
“Governor, if we are going to have a legal process that can send criminals to death that includes a special phase for mitigation shouldn’t we get it right?”
Mr. Geiger’s question gets to the heart of why Gov. Kasich should exercise his executive clemency powers now to commute Tibbetts’ death sentence to a life sentence with no opportunity for parole.