The man who was to be executed next week: Why death row inmate was saved

Raymond Tibbetts will spend the rest of his life in prison.

WARNING: Contains graphic content.

Two decades after Ohio man Ray Tibbetts brutally beat and stabbed his wife and another man to death, the 61-year-old has escaped from death row.

Tibbetts has been in prison for the past 21 years, waiting to die, after he was found guilty of the two murders and sentenced to death.

But in February, a juror that sat on Tibbetts' 1998 murder trial reached out to the governor of Ohio, John Kasich — the only person who had the power to save his life.

Juror Ross Geiger wrote to Governor Kasich saying Tibbetts' traumatic past and the horrific way he was treated through his childhood were never detailed at his lengthy murder trial.

In his letter, which was later released by Cleveland.com, Mr Geiger said deciding whether Tibbetts should be sentenced to death was "one of the most consequential decisions of my life".

Tibbetts was initially scheduled to die on February 13. Mr Geiger asked Governor Kasich to at least grant a temporary stay of execution.

"I had faith in the system in which I made my vote for death, but Ohio's criminal justice system failed me and Mr Tibbetts," he wrote.

"The system failed to provide me with the information I needed to make an accurate and fair determination.

"Mr Tibbetts' crimes were terrible, and nothing excuses his guilt. But if I had known all the facts, if the prosecutors had been honest and forthcoming about the horrors he and his siblings experienced in the foster care system, and if we had an accurate understanding of the effects of Mr. Tibbetts' severe drug and alcohol addiction and his improper opioid prescription, I would have voted for life without parole over death."

Ohio governor John Kasich.

Mr Gieger wrote the letter after reading the clemency report submitted by Tibbetts' lawyers.

The report claimed Tibbetts had been starved, beaten, burned and thrown down stairs as a child. It claimed he was tied to his bed at night.

After reading Mr Geiger's letter, the governor delayed Tibbetts' execution, which had been scheduled for October 17.

Tibbetts was due to die next week but the governor granted him clemency, permanently changing his sentence to life in prison.

"The defence's failure to present sufficient mitigating evidence, coupled with an inaccurate description of Tibbetts' childhood by the prosecution, essentially prevented the jury from making an informed decision about whether Tibbetts deserved the death sentence," Governor Kasich said.

THE CRIME

In November 1997, Judith Crawford threatened to kick her husband out of the Cincinnati home they shared with 67-year-old Fred Hicks, the sick landlord Judith had been caring for.

High on drugs and furious, Tibbetts lashed out at his 42-year-old wife, brutally beating her with a baseball bat and stabbing her with a knife dozens of times.

Mr Hicks, who had to permanently wear an oxygen mask because of his emphysema, was sitting in the living room as the brutal crime unfolded.

Tibbetts then walked to Mr Hicks and stabbed the ailing landlord with a number of knives, leaving him to die in his chair.

A day later, Mr Hicks' sister came to check on him realising her brother's car was gone.

Walking inside, she found her brother slumped in his chair with four knives still in his body.

Police attended and found Ms Crawford upstairs. A knife was still in her neck.

They had both been dead for hours when found.

Tibbetts and Ms Crawford had been living with Mr Hicks for less than a month before they were murdered.

A day later, Tibbetts checked into a mental health hospital under a different name in Kentucky.

But nurses at the hospital recognised him called the police.

DNA testing later revealed the clothes Tibbetts was wearing when he checked himself into the hospital were covered in the victims' blood and they also found blood inside Mr Hicks' car.

Tibbetts' execution was delayed a number of times over the years with the governor finally commuting his death penalty sentence in July.

THE EVER-SHIFTING DEATH PENALTY DEBATE

As Ohio grants one of its inmates clemency, other US states continue to debate the death penalty.

Earlier this week, Washington's Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state's death penalty as arbitrary and racially biased, making it the 20th state in the US to do away with capital punishment.

Execution was already extremely rare in Washington, with five prisoners put to death in recent decades and a governor-imposed moratorium blocking its use since 2014.

But the court's opinion eliminated it entirely, converted the sentences for the state's eight death row inmates to life in prison without release, and furthered a trend away from capital punishment in the US.

"The death penalty is becoming increasingly geographically isolated," Death Penalty Information Centre executive director Robert Dunham said.

"It's still on the books in 30 states, but it's not being used in 30 states. It's becoming a creature of the Deep South and the Southwest."

Ohio's execution room.

Texas continues to execute more prisoners than any other state — 108 since 2010.

Florida has executed 28, Georgia 26 and Oklahoma 21 in that time frame.

But nationally, death sentences are down 85 per cent since the 1990s, Mr Dunham said.

In the past 15 years, seven states — Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York — have abandoned capital punishment through court order or legislative act, and three — Colorado, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have adopted moratoriums.

In New Hampshire and Nebraska, politicians banned the death penalty but saw those decisions overturned by veto or referendum.

The concerns cited in those states have ranged from procedural matters, such as the information provided to sentencing jurors in New York, to worries about executing an innocent person or racial and other disparities in who is sentenced to death, as was the case in Washington.

"The death penalty is unequally applied — sometimes by where the crime took place, or the county of residence, or the available budgetary resources at any given point in time, or the race of the defendant," Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst wrote in the lead opinion.

"Our capital punishment law lacks 'fundamental fairness."

Earlier this year, the state Senate passed a measure abolishing the death penalty, but it failed to pass in the House.

"There is a profound shift in our state and country that the death penalty is below us as a civil, just and moral society," Democratic Sen. Reuven Carlyle, who had been a sponsor of those previous attempts, said in a text message. Republican Sen. Mike Padden, who voted against the death penalty abolition, said he was troubled by the ruling's impact.

"The death penalty should be rarely used, but I do think it should be an option in the most heinous cases," he said.