This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project - Cleveland, a nonprofit news team covering Ohio’s criminal justice systems.
When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called on lawmakers to abolish the state's death penalty last week, he wouldn’t tell reporters if he would spare any of the more than 100 people on death row.
Three weeks earlier, however, DeWine quietly did just that for Gregory Lott, a man with intellectual disabilities. Lott, now 64, will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole for the death of an 82-year-old East Cleveland man he set on fire during a home burglary in 1986.
The death row commutation is the first DeWine has issued in his eight years as governor and, together with his call to do away with capital punishment, represents the final steps in his five-decade evolution from death penalty proponent to skeptic.
The decision offered a glimpse into how he might use his power of mercy in the waning days of his final term in office. DeWine signed the order to commute Lott’s sentence on May 27, listing the reasons for sparing his life: the victim’s family had said their faith would not condone killing, the parole board had recommended leniency in 2020 and prosecutors dropped their objections.
Lott’s incarceration has spanned four decades of waning public support for executions and a steady decline in prosecutors seeking the death penalty in Ohio.
DeWine talked this month about how lengthy legal appeals and delays create uncertainty that death sentences would ever be carried out. Prisoners like Lott have been brought to the brink of death again and again, only to have their executions postponed — at least four times in Lott’s case
“It was a very convoluted path, and I genuinely feel for guys like Greg (Lott), who had real execution dates they were really facing,” said Stephen Ferrell, a federal public defender who was representing Lott.
Twice during DeWine’s tenure as governor, Lott’s execution was delayed. The first reprieve came in 2002, Ferrell explained, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court decided that executing people with intellectual disabilities is an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.
Six days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia, Lott’s attorneys filed for relief. The Ohio Supreme Court denied that claim and, in doing so, established what became known as “Lott’s test” for intellectual disability, which allowed prosecutors to refute claims of intellectual disability for people with IQ scores higher than 70. Lott had scored between 77 and 97 on such tests.
He was, again, scheduled for execution only to be saved by a horrific mishap. In 2014, the state botched the execution of Dennis McGuire. He gasped for 10 minutes after being injected with a new drug cocktail. In response, then Gov. John Kasich paused all pending executions.
“Otherwise, Greg Lott would have been executed a month later,” said Ferrell. “To me, that epitomizes the arbitrariness of this system.”
Meanwhile, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office continued to fight Lott's claim of disability until its own expert found him intellectually impaired, according to court records.
Between 2014 and 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned plans to execute intellectually disabled men in Florida and Texas, which also used arbitrary and outdated medical standards like those applied in Ohio. The rulings prompted the Ohio Supreme Court to revise Lott’s test in a 2019 decision by eliminating IQ scores as a sole reason for rejecting intellectual disability claims.
DeWine granted Lott a reprieve from execution in early 2020, citing a lack of available drugs to ensure a humane execution by lethal injection. A couple weeks later, Ferrell said an email arrived from the Ohio parole board, which hears requests for mercy and makes recommendations to the governor.
“Despite the reprieve, they wanted to go ahead with the clemency proceeding, which I thought was very odd and made me very optimistic,” said Ferrell.
Ferrell presented Lott’s request for mercy to the parole board. “It seemed different than past proceedings where I presented,” he said. “The board was very receptive compared to very hostile, as they had been in the past.”
Most importantly, the victim’s family did not want Lott dead.
John “Jack” McGrath, the man Lott was convicted of dousing in heating lamp oil and setting on fire, died after 10 days in the intensive care unit at a Cleveland hospital. McGrath’s Catholic pastor, Luigi Miola, said no one knew that McGrath, a garage door repairman, had any family until a son arrived from Boston shortly after the murder and knocked on the door of the parish where his father attended daily mass.
“They were contrary to the death penalty,” Miola said of the family’s Catholic pro-life position, which he conveyed to the parole board on behalf of the family.
The parole board voted 6-2 in favor of clemency. Ferrell checked periodically with the governor’s office but heard nothing. In 2022, prosecutors in Cuyahoga County withdrew their opposition to Lott’s claim for mercy. The case continued to move through the state courts, and DeWine intervened at the end of May with a quiet commutation that effectively ended a nearly quarter century legal battle.
A former county prosecutor, DeWine has a long history with the death penalty, both in Ohio and in Washington. He co-sponsored the bipartisan state bill that reinstated Ohio’s death penalty in 1981. In Congress, he voted to expand federal crimes punishable by death and to speed up executions. As the state’s attorney general, he defended Ohio’s death penalty statute in court and secured capital indictments in many murder cases.
Yet this month, after more than 300 death sentences and 56 executions over the past half-century, DeWine positioned himself a skeptic, noting delays that undermine deterrence and the pain and anguish felt by victims’ families in the 21 years it takes, on average, from the time of sentencing to actual executions.
In an interview with NPR, DeWine was asked if he could live with the decision of leaving office without commuting the death sentences he now opposes. “I'm just not going to get into that today,” he said, with a laugh, about how he usually doesn’t dodge questions.
Lott, who did not respond to a request for comment, had “a hard time expressing himself” at each twist and turn in his case, Ferrell said. “I could see visibly what was going on, that he was either really hurting and anxious, or when we got good news, just how relieved he was.”
“To torture someone like that year after year is unfathomable to me,” he said.