The latest on life and death in Ohio. As protestors gather against the death penalty in Youngstown, a Trumbull County family spends the weekend preparing to fight another plea for clemency.
Strong passions drive both sides in this controversy. Near Ohio's supermax prison on the east side, capitol punishment protestors prepared to release balloons as symbols of the inmates on death row. Theresa Lyons of Youngstown has a grandson in the prison, awaiting execution for murder. She said he didn't do it. "I will continue to fight for his innocence. I will continue to fight for the ones who are on death row, innocent or not. I just don't believe in the death penalty. I never did."
A federal judge put a hold on executions in Ohio last month after the state botched a lethal injection. Attorney and protestor Staughton Lynd said we should learn something from this. "Force a person to imagine what it's like for them to stick those needles in to try to and find the vein and yes, it's as if we're all on the gurney going through the experience."
The protestors had hoped the wind might carry the balloons over the penitentiary so the inmates might see them, however, they blew away in the opposite direction. Tom Heiss has the opposite point of view from the protestors as he remembers his sister, Tami Engstrom of Hubbard, murdered in 1991. "It's just ignorant that they could back these people up that are in prison. They've been put in prison for a reason, for a crime that they committed, it's not a circus."
Ken Biros was finally scheduled to die next month for killing Tami. The judge's order has postponed his execution as well, but he still has a clemency hearing Monday in Columbus, and in case the executions resume, the family says they have to be there to argue against it, and for Biros' death. "It's going to be rough. We have to live the same nightmare over again. It's just an ongoing nightmare," said Heiss.
