Joel Drain was sentenced to death by the State of Ohio for a prison murder
According to court documents Drain would invite fellow inmate Christopher Richardson into his cell and proceeded to beat him to death with a fan motor. Joel Drain who was already serving a lengthy sentence for murder told officials an urge to kill came over him
Drain would be convicted and sentenced to death
Joel Drain would legally change their name to Victoria Drain
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Where Is Joel Drain Now
Joel Drain is incarcerated at Ohio State Penitentiary
Joel Drain Case
The Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously upheld the death sentence for an inmate who murdered a fellow prisoner at the Warren Correctional Institute in Lebanon, outside Cincinnati, in 2019.
Victoria Drain pleaded no contest to charges, including aggravated murder, and requested a three-judge panel consider her case rather than a jury. As she was appealing the case, Drain legally changed her name from Joel Drain, according to Court News Ohio, a service of the Ohio Supreme Court.
Writing for the court, Justice Sharon L. Kennedy explained that Drain admitted to planning inmate Christopher Richardson’s death. Kennedy wrote that the aggravating circumstances, or the conditions that add to the seriousness of an offense, far outweigh any mitigating evidence that would lead to a lesser sentence.
“The killing itself was extraordinarily brutal,” Kennedy wrote
While agreeing the conviction should stand, Justice Jennifer Brunner dissented on the death sentence.
A new mitigation hearing was needed because Drain’s attorneys failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence, she wrote. And “there is a reasonable probability that, but for the counsel’s deficient performance, Drain would have been spared the death penalty.”
Kennedy, a Republican, and Brunner, a Democrat, are running for the chief justice position in the Nov. 8 election.
Ohio has continued to hand out death sentences and set execution dates despite a yearslong problem acquiring lethal-injection drugs. Pharmaceutical companies increasingly have been unwilling to sell drugs to be used in executions. The state has not carried out a death sentence for a death row inmate since July 2018, as Gov. Mike DeWine has continually pushed back execution dates.
