Ohio was on track to set a record for lethal injections Wednesday as it planned its eighth of 2010, the execution of a man who bludgeoned his girlfriend to death, threw her body in a river and stole her ATM card to buy crack cocaine, the Associated Press reported today..
Gov. Ted Strickland on Tuesday denied clemency fors Michael Benge, a day before the scheduled execution that would break the state's record of the most people put to death in a year since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999. The previous high of seven was set in 2004.
Ohio's all-time record for executions occurred in 1949, when 15 men died by electric chair.
Benge, 49, was moved Tuesday from death row in Youngstown to the southern Ohio prison that houses the state's execution chamber. A spokeswoman for the public defender's office said he had no more legal appeals.
Benge was convicted of aggravated murder, aggravated robbery and gross abuse of a corpse in the 1993 death of Judith Gabbard, his live-in girlfriend, who was upset about his drug use. Benge beat Gabbard repeatedly in the head with a tire iron. He weighted her body with concrete and slid it into the river, leaving her car stuck in the bloodstained mud.
In seeking mercy, his lawyers said Benge was physically abused by a stepfather and stepbrother and began abusing substances when he was 11 - first alcohol, then marijuana and eventually cocaine. They said he has a brain impairment as a result.
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