COLUMBUS — Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine agrees that sometimes his personal views help guide his decisions as to when to get involved in cases beyond the state’s borders.

As he promised in the 2010 campaign, he joined multiple states in challenging President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He weighed in on challenges to the contraception coverage mandate under that law. He filed a brief before the U.S. Supreme Court to personally challenge the constitutionality of an Ohio law prohibiting lying in campaign materials even as his office was defending the law.

“The issue of Obamacare and whether Ohio should join the suit … was argued out in the last campaign,” Mr. DeWine said. “[Then-Democratic Attorney General] Rich Cordray had a very principled position that Ohio shouldn’t do that, and I had a principled position that Ohio should. Reasonable people can disagree on these things, but when people voted, I didn’t make that a secret.”

Many of the cases he’s weighed in on involve law enforcement issues and challenges to federal infringement on state rights, he said. Some deal with abortion.

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“I think anybody who’s looked at that knows I’m pro-life,” Mr. DeWine said. “Is some of it driven by what you believe? Sure. I’m the attorney general. I make the decision.”

Mr. DeWine — a Republican former U.S. senator, lieutenant governor, and Greene County prosecutor — is seeking a second term as the state’s top law enforcement official and lawyer. He faces David Pepper, a Democratic former Hamilton County commissioner and Cincinnati councilman.

Mr. Pepper has criticized the attorney general for forging ahead with appeals of federal decisions on such issues as gay marriage and voting rights. “We’ve lost five straight voting-rights cases,” Mr. Pepper said. “At some point ... maybe you should question the lawyer in charge and his legal judgment.”

Mr. DeWine said he doesn’t have a choice but to defend Ohio law and its constituation.

“You can’t be in a position where a judge says, ‘Is the state of Ohio ready to proceed,’ and there’s nobody sitting there at the table,” he said. “What was unique about the elections [false statements] case was I felt we had an obligation to inform the court as to how the law was actually being used in the state of Ohio — not just what it said, but the fact that, in my opinion based on the facts I observed, it was having a chilling effect on the First Amendment.”

So far, Mr. DeWine’s personal position has prevailed.

He cites his office’s reduction in the backlog of untested DNA samples at the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, a key campaign issue for him four years ago. He said the untested samples, including rape kits, have been reduced from about 8,800 to 3,300 with 37 percent coming up with a match of samples already in the state DNA database.

A number of those have led to indictments years after the crimes occurred.

He said the turnaround time for the testing of evidence newly submitted from local law enforcement has been reduced from an average of 125 days to about 22 days.

First Published October 26, 2014, 4:00 a.m.