Now that Ohio has deterred John Byrd from committing any more crimes we can look forward to the state's next target of permanent justice.

        Who will it be?

        Alton Coleman maybe? He's looking at death sentences in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois for people he killed during a seven-week spree in 1984. His Ohio victims were 15-year-old Tonnie Story of Cincinnati and 44-year-old Marlene Walters of Norwood.

        It could be Michael Beuke, the one we called the “hitchhiker killer” back when he was convicted in 1983. He would thumb rides in Hamilton County and then murder anyone foolish enough to pick him up.

        Or it could be David Steffen, the first person Hamilton County sent to death row under its current law. He was selling cleaning products door-to-door in 1982, when he raped and cut the throat of a young woman who opened the door to him.

        I could go on. These are only three of the 200 people Ohio has on death row. About a fifth of them are from Hamilton County. I have a passing connection to the three mentioned above. I covered their arrests or trials, along a number of others who now reside with them up at Mansfield Correctional Institution.

        I never covered a murder trial where I thought an innocent person was convicted. These three all are as guilty as John Byrd, whose arm we stuck with a needle Tuesday morning. John Byrd was a sorry excuse for a human being. He had no more remorse Tuesday morning than he did that night 19 years ago when he stuck a knife in Monte Tewksbury, almost as an afterthought, after robbing the store where Mr. Tewksbury clerked.

        All killing John Byrd did was let us retire the electric chair. He was the last person to be offered a choice of execution methods. From now on, Ohio will offer only lethal injection — until something better comes along. But killing Byrd didn't fix anything. And neither will killing Coleman, Beuke, Steffen or any of the others. The death penalty has been back on the books in Ohio for almost 20 years and it didn't deter any of the inmates at Mansfield. We, the people of Ohio, now have something in common with John Byrd. We have killed someone when we didn't have to.

        If you think this has somehow made you safer, I advise you to keep locking your doors at night. If you somehow feel a sense of joy that this man is now dead, I leave you to look into your own soul.

        We can't seem to apply the death penalty efficiently in Ohio. After 20 years Byrd is only the third execution Ohio has actually carried out. Pro-death penalty types blame the pace on what they see as an anti-death penalty bias on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. But the most obvious death penalty foe on the court, Judge Nathaniel Jones, is retiring and nobody expects the pace to pick up. Ohioans don't really want to be like Texas or Florida, where executions happen so often they are practically news briefs.

        Nor do we apply the death penalty equitably in Ohio. For all its supposed execution zeal, Hamilton County cut a deal with the most notorious killer in the state's history. All Donald Harvey, a.k.a. “The Angel of Death,” had to do to stay off death row was to keep confessing. He traded guilty pleas for his life. Harvey claimed to have killed 28 people in Ohio and another nine in Kentucky before being caught in 1987.

        This creepy little sociopath, who poisoned and smothered many of his victims while working as a hospital nursing aide, laughed at the fact that the cops didn't even know most of these deaths were murders until he told them.

        People like Byrd and Steffen explode in brutal moments. Coleman and Beuke do it over weeks and months. They all get sentenced to die. Donald Harvey didn't lose control or go on a “spree.” He practiced murder as a career, yet he gets to keep laughing through consecutive life sentences.

        It we can put a horror like Donald Harvey away forever with a clean conscience, we ought to be able to do the same thing with all of those folks waiting in line up in Mansfield.

        Contact David Wells at 768-8310; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: dwells@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Wells.

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