If Cincinnati musician Michael Bany had been Black instead of white, chances are the man who killed him in 1995 wouldn't be sitting on death row today.
That's the stance taken by lawyers representing Walter Raglin, who was convicted in 1996 of aggravated murder in Bany's death.
William Gallagher, a Cincinnati defense attorney who opposes the death penalty, on Friday filed a motion based on the findings of a 2020 study that determined Black defendants convicted of killing white victims are far more likely to be capitally indicted than they'd be for victims of color.
Technically, Gallagher's motion is a request to file a follow-up motion requesting a new trial. Such a request is typically supposed to be filed within 120 days of the jury's verdict, but Galagher contends that the statute of limitations should be waived because the study examining 25 years of data was just released last year.
According to the filing, Raglin's "odds of receiving a death sentence were 5.33 times higher than other aggravated murder cases simply because of his race and the race of the victim."
The study providing that statistic was conducted by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, which analyzed 599 aggravated murder charges in Hamilton County from January 1992 to August 2017.
Its findings were two-pronged: First, Black defendants are more likely to be charged with capital murder, period; and second, those odds climb even higher for Black defendants accused of killing at least one white victim.
While the study is recent and far broader in scope than previous analyses, its findings line up with similar studies done in the past. For example, the Associated Press analyzed more than 1,900 capital cases throughout Ohio from October 1981 to December 2002 and found defendants were twice as likely to be sentenced to death if their victim was white rather than Black.
The reason the new study zeroes in on Hamilton County specifically is because it has one of the highest capital punishment rates in the country. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters has said he considers cases for death penalty eligibility only if "there is no issue of proof."
"I set the bar higher than the law requires, and only the absolute worst cases are considered for death penalty prosecution," Deters said in a statement last year regarding a separate report that found that capital cases cost Hamilton County taxpayers about $1 million per case. That report, conducted by the Cincinnati-based Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center, said the average cost of a life-without-parole case is about half a million dollars.
The motion filed Friday by Gallagher is on behalf of a single defendant but could have broader implications if it leads to a new trial for his client. Hamilton County currently has 21 people on death row, the most of any county in Ohio.
Attempts to reach Deters were unsuccessful after the motion was filed Friday afternoon.
Musician Michael Bany was killed Dec. 29, 1995, as he left an Over-the-Rhine bar after a performance on Main Street in Cincinnati. According to an appellate filing from 2006, Bany was carrying a bass guitar and other music equipment as he walked to his car when Raglin and another man, Darnell "Bubba" Lowery, approached to rob him.
The suspects pulled a .380 semiautomatic pistol on Bany and demanded his money. Bany handed them three $20 bills. As Bany bent to pick up his equipment, Raglin shot him in the left side of his neck, just below the earlobe, killing him.
Within a week of the shooting, a tipster identified Raglin as Bany's killer. Raglin ultimately gave a full confession. He was sentenced to death. His accomplice was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
In the wake of Bany's killing, a scholarship fund was formed in his honor to help students with financial needs pursue music degrees. Bany, 41, had played with a band called the Goshorn Brothers.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that the death penalty was unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment because it was imposed arbitrarily nationwide, individual states drafted new guidelines in hopes of making its application more uniform. Ohio reintroduced capital punishment in 1981. Since then, 56 people have been put to death in Ohio, representing about 16% of the total number of people sentenced to die in that time period.
The system has been at a standstill since 2018 because Ohio wasn't able to acquire lethal-injection drugs. Gov. Mike DeWine has declared a "de facto moratorium" on executions until lawmakers choose a different method of execution, such as lethal gas or firing squad.
The governor, who had decades ago helped craft Ohio's guidelines to restore the death penalty, has more recently told reporters that the threat of capital punishment isn't the deterrent it once was because the appellate process is so lengthy.
"We're not going to execute anyone under the status quo," DeWine told reporters in December 2020.
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