Ted Strickland is Spineless

by Max Johnson

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland is a jellyfish with no backbone. Today he commuted the sentence of Sidney Cornwell sparing his life. The final record for Strickland was 3 commutations and he killed 17 people. One of the people, Kevin Keith, had a strong argument for actually being innocent. The reason that Cornwell was spared: he was teased as a kid." Give me a break!!! Strickland was a minister or is a minister, and I had high hopes that he would challenge the death penalty. I thought that he was in the perfect position to argue that only God takes a human life. Instead he bowed to public pressure. This is why there was not the enthusiasm for Strickland to motivate voters. What did he stand for? When thinking of Strickland what is the one issue that comes to mind first. Nothing? He was the governor of Ohio for four nears and he has nothing to show for his time in office. Ohio is in no way better off than it was four years ago.

His supporters will say that he lost because of the bad economy and the loss of jobs. But the truth is that he lost because he gave Ohioan no reason to vote for him. This commutation today seems like a political move. When he was running for office, he had no problem killing people. After the election, his morality comes back and he can't push the plunger on the poison. Hell, he even had the state of Ohio argue that the current method of killing people was not cruel and unusual punishment. I do not believe that Mark Brown, Jason Getsy, and Kenneth Biros, all victims of Strickland's political calculation, were also not teased as kids. Strickland faced a horrible candidate, and he could not beat him. While Ohioans probably support the death penalty, they would have understood that a minister cannot execute a person. He could have taken the bully pulpit to educate Ohioans about the horrible cost to society of state sponsored murder. Instead he stayed in the middle of the road and was run over.