COLUMBUS — A man serving time in a southwestern Ohio prison for a 1978 West Toledo robbery and murder faces execution Jan. 12, 2017, for brutally murdering his cellmate 19 years later.
The Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday set the date for the lethal injection of James Galen Hanna, 65, for stabbing cellmate Peter Copas, 43, in the eye and bludgeoning him with a sock containing a padlock at the Lebanon Correctional Institution in 1997.
Copas died nearly three weeks later.
Hanna has exhausted his state and federal appeals.
The sole dissent in setting a date came from Justice William O’Neill, a death penalty opponent who routinely refuses to schedule executions.
In a letter sent to an inmate at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, Hanna called Copas, who was serving a sentence for corruption of a minor, a “maggot baby-raper-killer.” He bragged that he “made him suffer pretty good” as he repeatedly stabbed him with a knife fashioned from a paintbrush and beat him for two hours until morning head count.
“He lived for twenty-and-a-half hours after that before he croaked,” he wrote.
Hanna was in the prison in Warren County serving a life sentence for the murder of Edward V. Tucker, 18, who was working his first solo night shift at a West Toledo convenience store.
A recent high school graduate, Mr. Tucker planned to study chemistry that fall at the University of Toledo.
Hanna stabbed him numerous times and then turned on the district manager who surprised him by walking in on the morning robbery. Harvey W. Blitz, then 26, also was stabbed numerous times but survived. Hanna was convicted of attempted aggravated murder in that case.
Ohio executions are currently scheduled to resume in early 2016 and continue into 2017 at the pace of roughly one a month. Gov. John Kasich imposed a moratorium on executions through this year because of the state’s continuing struggles to acquire its preferred execution drugs as well as pending execution-related litigation.
Hanna is a defendant in the pending challenge in federal court to Ohio’s death penalty process, but he has not been granted a stay of execution.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Hanna’s conviction and death sentence in 2013, prompting Warren County Prosecutor David P. Fornshell to request the setting of a date.
Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.
First Published February 20, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
