Ohio’s death row has one less inmate today.
Convicted murderer John W. Byrd Jr. was executed yesterday at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville. The 38-year-old man was administered a lethal injection at 10 a.m. and pronounced dead at 10:09 a.m.
Byrd was convicted in the 1983 murder of Monte Tewksbury during a botched convenience store robbery near Cincinnati. Byrd, who was 19 at the time of the crime, had spent half of his life on death row.
Byrd has maintained his innocence since the crime, and continued to do so yesterday in his final statement, which also expressed hostility toward Gov. Bob Taft for refusing to grant him clemency.
“The corruption of the state will fall,” Byrd said. “Gov. Taft, you will not be re-elected. The rest of you, you know where you can go.”
In his final statement, Byrd also told his family he loved them.
John E. Brewer, Byrd’s accomplice in the robbery, confessed to killing Tewksbury in two sworn affidavits, but courts deemed Brewer’s testimony non-credible. Prosecutors maintained Brewer lied in order to try and save Byrd because he is serving a life sentence and cannot be retried.
A statement from Attorney General Betty Montgomery yesterday said she is confident the state executed the correct man.
“More than 20 years ago, Ohio’s policy-makers determined that the death penalty was an appropriate punishment for the limited number of crimes that rank as society’s most heinous and most vicious. This was one of those crimes.
A jury of John Byrd’s peers heard the evidence, found him guilty, and recommended the death penalty. At least 117 judges and countless appeals have not found any reason to reverse this judgment,” Montgomery said in her statement.
“My thoughts and prayers go out to the Tewksbury family. Their long wait is finally over. My thoughts and prayers also go out to the family and supporters of John Byrd,” Montgomery said.
David Bodiker, Byrd’s public defender, said he last talked to Byrd Monday night, and Bodiker described his demeanor as “very strong.”
“I would never have conceived that Mr. Byrd would be executed,” Bodiker said. “I thought that at some point the system would act appropriately. It’s frightening that a man can be convicted and killed on the basis of a jailhouse snitch.”
A number of protestors gathered outside the Statehouse and the penitentiary near Lucasville to protest the death penalty yesterday.
Byrd’s family has threatened to sue the state in a wrongful death suit on the grounds that Byrd is innocent, and thus wrongfully executed. Bodiker said the family has hired Columbus attorney Clifford Arnebeck to handle the possible lawsuit.
Yesterday’s execution was Ohio’s third since the death penalty was reinstated in 1981.
