High Court Tosses Mother's Death Sentence

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Citing a judge's error, the Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out the death sentence of a woman who killed her 4-year-old son and set a fire to hide evidence of the crime.

The move leaves just one woman in Ohio facing execution.

Though the state has an active capital punishment system, it doesn't have a history of sending many women to death row.

Only six women have been sentenced to death under the state's 1981 capital punishment law.

The court said in its unanimous decision Wednesday that the judge in the trial of Nicole Diar of Lorain made a mistake by not telling the jury that a single juror's negative vote could prevent a death sentence.

Visiting Judge Kosma Glavas, a retired Lorain County judge, sentenced Diar to death in 2005. Glavas died in 2007.

Diar's public defender said he was happy with the decision for now.

"It's a good win, but there's still a lot of work to do," said Justin Thompson, an assistant state public defender. "She's still eligible for death down the road."

Diar, 33, was convicted of killing her son, Jacob, whose body was found after a fire in their house in Lorain on Aug. 27, 2003.

Prosecutors said the boy was suffocated or drowned before Diar poured gasoline around her house, then set a fire to cover up evidence. The boy's puppy also died in the fire.

The boy's body was so badly burned that the coroner was unable to determine the cause of death.

The state Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that judges should tell jurors about the impact a single juror can have.

In Diar's case, the court said that violations of its 1996 decision haven't always resulted in death penalty reversals.

But in this instance, prosecutors themselves recommended that the mistake was enough to reverse the death sentence and require a new sentencing.

"We accept the state's concession of error," Justice Maureen O'Connor said in the opinion.

The court upheld Diar's aggravated murder conviction.

Lorain County Prosecutor Dennis Will said a new death sentence will be up to a jury that hears the case but he believes Diar deserves to die.

"I don't think anything I've seen in my career was more egregious than that crime because of the age of victim and the manner in which it was carried out," Will said Wednesday.

Diar was one of two women on Ohio's death row. Donna Roberts of Trumbull County was returned to death row in 2007 after the state Supreme Court had reversed her first death sentence.

Only 11 women have been executed in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty constitutional in 1972. The country executed 1,125 men during the same period.

Texas, the country's busiest death penalty state, has 353 people on death row, including 10 women. California has 15 women on death row among 667 total inmates.

One woman was put to death in Ohio in the 19th century, when Franklin County hanged a woman for killing a fellow inmate at the state penitentiary.

Ohio executed three women by electric chair in the 20th century, including two women in 1954 condemned to die for separate crimes. More than 300 men were executed in the state during the last century.

A Summit County judge sentenced Sandra Lockett of Akron to death in 1975 for her role in killing a pawnbroker during a robbery. But the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that sentence in 1978 when it found Ohio's then-death penalty law unconstitutional.

In 1991, Gov. Richard Celeste, a Democrat with just a few days left in office, commuted the death sentences of eight offenders, including four women, all of whom were black. Celeste said he had concerns about racial disparities in Ohio's death penalty system.

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