09 February 2018 :

Governor John Kasich grants an 8-month reprieve to Raymond Tibbetts, whose execution was scheduled for February 13, 2018.The purpose of the temporary reprieve is to allow the Ohio Parole Board to convene a hearing to consider new evidence bearing on Mr. Tibbetts’ clemency request. His execution has been rescheduled for Oct. 17, 2018. Tibbetts, 60, White, Tibbetts was convicted in 1998 in Hamilton County of stabbing to death 67-year-old Fred Hicks and beating his 42-year-old caretaker Judith Crawford to death with a baseball bat in Hicks’ Cincinnati home on November 6, 1997. At the conclusion of the penalty phase, the jury recommended that Tibbetts be sentenced to death for the Hicks murder and to life imprisonment without parole for the Crawford murder. The trial court adopted the jury's recommendation and sentenced Tibbetts accordingly. One of the original jurors in the case recently (Jan. 30) wrote a letter to Kasich asking him to commute Tibbetts' death sentence to life in prison without parole. The juror, Ross Geiger, argued that, given what he knows now about possible malpractice by Tibbetts' trial attorneys, the man's difficult upbringing and an opioid addiction developed as an adult, he wouldn't have voted to send Tibbetts to the death chamber.