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In January 2011, Pfeifer made his strongest statements to date, calling on Kasich to empty death row. Pfeifer says he's required as a judge to take positions to make laws better, hence his current stand. He's also required to rule according to the law and the Constitution, which he says he does. Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor says she's comfortable Pfeifer is following the law and not showing bias. Since 2001, Pfeifer has written the majority opinion upholding death sentences in five cases, dissented in two others and upheld death sentences while disagreeing on aspects of the decision in four other cases. As recently as December, Pfeifer set an execution date, signing the order for a man who raped and killed his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughter. Ohio first allowed the option of life without parole instead of a death sentence in 1996, then changed the law in 2005 to make it even easier to put killers behind bars for life while skipping death penalty charges altogether. Pfeifer says those changes have made the death penalty unnecessary. State Rep. Ron Young, a conservative Republican, challenged Pfeifer on this point in December, arguing that removing the death penalty would create a slippery slope where eventually life without parole would be challenged as too harsh. Pfeifer's experience as a death penalty supporter-turned-opponent is not isolated. Gerald Kogan, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court who prosecuted death penalty cases early in his legal career, now says the death penalty should be abolished, with the possible exception of worst of the worst defendants such as Osama bin Laden or a mass serial killer. Rudy Gerber helped write Arizona's death penalty law in the 1970s but now opposes capital punishment and represents death row defendants trying to escape the law he created. In California, Don Heller authored a 1978 ballot initiative that created the state's death penalty law. Thirty years later, with more than 700 inmates on death row, Heller has changed course and is advocating the law's demise, saying it's too prone to human error.
[Associated
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