After more than 30 years on death row in an Ohio prison, Keith LaMar’s scheduled November 16 execution has been postponed to January 2027 due to a lack of lethal injections, state officials said Thursday (13).
“The new date for the execution has been postponed to January 13, 2027,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said in a statement, basing his decision on “problems with the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers, the Department of Rehabilitation and Ohio to provide medicines.” “ reasoned.
In April, DeWine had already postponed the executions scheduled for August, September and October of this year to 2026 for the same reasons. The state has not carried out the death penalty since 2018.
More and more pharmaceutical companies are refusing to manufacture the lethal injection given to death row inmates.
LaMar, 54, was sentenced to death for the killing of five inmates and a prison guard during an April 1993 riot at the prison where he was serving his time. According to him, his trial was fraught with irregularities such as destruction of evidence and concealment of information that rendered him innocent.
He has consistently denied responsibility for the deaths and has spent most of the past 30 years awaiting execution in isolation in a maximumsecurity prison in Ohio.
“Three years can go by in a blink of an eye, so let’s redouble our efforts and energy to put an end to this madness once and for all,” LaMar said in a message sent to AFP, thanking those who supported him supported and promoted “the belief and the conviction that even better things are possible”.
LaMar has been imprisoned since he was 19 for the murder of an old friend in connection with a drug dispute in the 1980s and says prison authorities asked him to report those responsible and get a reduced sentence after the riot he agreed. refused to do so.
LaMar, who wrote a book telling her story and protesting her innocence, is fighting to have her case reopened and a fair trial.
“If you’re poor and black in a racist country, you’re a poor convict,” he said in an AFP interview last year from death row.
His case has taken a turn for the last two years. In addition to a team of attorneys trying to reinstate the lawsuit, a group of jazz musicians — the music that rescued him from the confines of his loneliness — are campaigning to demand “justice for Keith LaMar.”
Using a phone on death row, LaMar recorded an album with the Spanish band Albert Marqués and, as another member of the group, attended numerous concerts the group gave in countries such as Spain, France, Chile and in several cities in the United States.
“May we keep asking for justice, we’re almost there,” LaMar says in his message of hope.