A Cleveland man hopes to see Ohio’s death penalty abolished so that no one else experiences what he went through.
Kwame Ajamu was sentenced to death and later exonerated.
“I spent three years, seven weeks and 8 hours on death row for a crime that I didn’t do,” Ajamu told an audience of about 40 Tuesday at a panel discussion on the death penalty in the University of Akron’s Student Union Theater.
Ajamu, formerly known as Ronnie Bridgeman, frequently wiped away tears as he recalled his experiences. He, his brother, Wylie Bridgeman, and their best friend, Ricky Jackson, were all exonerated after being sentenced to death for a 1975 murder in Cleveland. Ajamu was released from prison on parole in 2003, while Bridgeman and Jackson both were incarcerated for nearly 40 years. A judge declared them innocent in 2015 and all three were compensated by the state.
“They came into this neighborhood that is all black and left out of the neighborhood with three of its occupants,” said Ajamu, who was 17 when he was arrested. “We wouldn’t be back for 40 years. So many moments in life. Seventeen years in prison. Now, all of the seniors are gone. I’m a senior. My brother is a senior.”
The panel discussion, called The Death Lottery: How Race Impacts the Death Penalty in Ohio, was part of UA’s Rethinking Race forum, going on through Feb. 12.
The panelists, each with personal experience dealing with capital punishment cases, provided context for a newly released report that found racial, gender and geographic disparities in Ohio’s death penalty process.
Convicted murderers executed in Ohio are disproportionately black, and executions also are disproportionate if the victim is white and the murderer is black.
“This study shows white lives matter and black lives don’t,” said the Rev. Jack Sullivan Jr., executive director of Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, a national organization working to end the death penalty.
Sullivan said “until all lives matter,” he thinks the death penalty should be abolished in Ohio. His younger sister was murdered in Cleveland in 1997, with the person responsible never caught. Still, his group doesn’t think the death penalty is the answer, especially because of racial problems in the justice system.
“As hurt as we have been, we don’t see any hope for us in the execution of those accused for killing our loved ones,” he said. “The death of the convicted person will not bring back our loved ones.”
Short of getting rid of the death penalty, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Stephen McIntosh discussed some of the 56 recommendations for improving Ohio’s capital punishment process recently made by the Ohio Supreme Court’s death penalty task force, which he co-chaired.
The recommendations included requiring testing in capital cases to be done at accredited labs, specifying that interrogations of defendants facing the death penalty must be video taped, excluding people with mental illnesses from being executed, and establishing a statewide capital litigation fund to help pay for death-penalty cases in counties that can’t afford them.
“Sometimes, whether you will be charged with a capital case depends on where you are in Ohio,” McIntosh said.
Abraham Bonowitz, who heads Ohioans to Stop Executions, urged those who attended the event to consider writing to their state lawmakers and the governor to urge them to adopt the task force’s recommendations. He provided fliers on the recommendations and postcards to send to lawmakers and Gov. John Kasich.
After the discussion, Judi Hill, president of the Akron chapter of the NAACP, said she plans to share the information at her organization’s next meeting. She thinks the NAACP needs to be doing more on the local, state and national levels to push for changes in the criminal justice system.
“Conversation, we can do,” she said. “We need to take it a step further.”
The discussion also made an impression on students who attended.
“My eyes were pretty much opened,” said Marissa Mariner, 17, a student at Akron’s STEM high school who also is taking classes at UA. “I’ve been a strong believer that there should be a death penalty. Now, I’m questioning my own beliefs.”
Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at 330-996-3705 or swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @swarsmithabj and on Facebook: www.facebook.com/swarsmith.