The morning newsletter of the Ohio Capital Journal
Reporting for the People
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By David DeWitt | Editor in Chief
Good morning Ohio!
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wants Ohio to abolish the death penalty, but stopped short of taking any executive action Tuesday when he held a news conference on the subject.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine during his final State of the State address at the Ohio Statehouse in March 2026. (Pool photo by Adam Cairns, Columbus Dispatch.)
By Megan Henry
“It is impossible today to make the case that the death penalty is a deterrent,” DeWine said. “I no longer believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. … The most effective thing to deal with violent crime is to go after the repeat violent offenders and lock them the hell up, that’s what’s effective.”
By Marty Schladen
A new poll by the Brennan Center for Justice found that huge bipartisan majorities in the United States believe corruption is a big problem.
By Amanda Becker, The 19th News
In a city transformed by President Trump’s immigration policies, Springfield, Ohio women came together Sunday night to watch Jane Fonda’s “Rise Up, Sing Out” event to reaffirm the country they’re fighting for.
COMMENTARY
Getty Images file photo of a voter registration form.
By Marilou Johanek
The specter of the federal government weaponized to subvert a free and fair election is no longer conjecture in Ohio after FBI agents raided a voter registration group that has been successfully registering minorities and college students for two decades.
STATELINE
The big challenges and policy issues that cross state lines.
By Tim Henderson
The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Fed has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. The percentage is likely the largest since the end of World War II.
By Tim Henderson
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to weigh in on the issue of whether some immigrants with criminal records can be detained indefinitely.
By Amanda Watford
People who carry out mass public shootings often display warning signs long before an attack, but the signals are frequently fragmented across friends, family members, coworkers, and institutions, making them difficult to piece together, a new study shows.
THE RUNDOWN
News from other states
By Ross Williams
The Georgia Legislature is set to gavel in for a special legislative session Wednesday in part to redraw its boundaries for congressional and state legislative elections following a U.S. Supreme Court decision undoing a key part of the Voting Rights Act.
By Rudi Keller
Missouri election officials will begin mailing Aug. 4 primary ballots Tuesday to military and overseas voters using the state’s gerrymandered congressional districts, even as the legal status of those districts remains unresolved.
NATIONAL NEWS
By Jonathan Shorman
As election officials across the country steel themselves for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail threatens to upend their preparations.
By Sam Gauntt
Days after President Donald Trump’s name was removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a large tarp and scaffolding was still blocking the building’s facade from public view Monday afternoon.
WEDNESDAY WISDOM
“The spasms of nature are centuries and ages and will tax the faith of short-lived men. Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely. The proverbs of the nations affirm these delays, but affirm the arrival.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
CATCHING OUR EYE
Defeat. SkyNews International Affairs Editor Dominic Waghorn writes, “Iran deal is tacit admission of strategic defeat by Trump administration.”
Donald Trump has arrived for this week's G7 summit in France keen to celebrate his peace deal with Iran. But the agreement has only proved this war was one of the greatest strategic blunders in US history.
The Iran "deal" is a tacit admission of strategic defeat by the Trump administration and of a failure to achieve nearly all of his war aims.
The US and Iran have agreed to stop fighting and to open the Strait of Hormuz. Everything else is being kicked down the road over 60 days of ceasefire and beyond.
Given that the Strait was open before the conflict was started by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, reopening it is no great achievement. It simply restores the status quo ante bellum.Doubts. Axios reports, “Scoop: CIA director doubts Iran's intentions on deal, sources say.”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe told President Trump and other senior officials that intelligence gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies raised serious doubts about Iran's willingness to make the nuclear concessions the U.S. is seeking in any final deal, according to three sources familiar with those discussions.
Friction point: Ratcliffe isn't the only skeptic in Trump's top team. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have both expressed concerns and raised questions about the deal in internal discussions, while Vice President Vance and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner advocated for it, according to two of the sources.Drone plot Ohio arrest. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Quinlan Bentley reports, “FBI foils UFC event drone plot. Arrest made in Cincinnati, report says.”
One person was arrested in Cincinnati in connection with what federal authorities described as a planned and targeted attack against the Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House, according to authorities and news reports.
The FBI and other law enforcement agencies became aware on June 10 of a possible threat involving people outside of the nation's capital targeting last weekend's event, FBI Director Kash Patel said on social media.
THE POD
THAT'S ALL FOR NOW, FOLKS.
Mahalo!
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