USA - Dale Baich

USA - Dale Baich: A defender on death row

March 8, 2026:

March 8, 2026 - USA. Dale Baich: In defense of death row

Dale Baich has watched 16 men die.

Over the course of his career as a federal public defender, Baich has parsed through the many legal webs entangling death row inmates and protocol in the years, months, weeks and days leading up to their executions. He has watched people walk from death row, and he has sat in the witness room.
Now, he draws on his experience with the hope of influencing the dialogue on death row and execution methods, as Arizona continues to grapple with its fraught past with capital punishment.

Questions and answers have been lightly edited for style and clarity.

How did you get here?
When I first started practicing in Cleveland, I had a partner and we had a general practice, and I wasn’t the best businessman. After five years, it was time to try something else, and there was a position open at the state public defender’s office in Ohio with the death penalty unit.

What expectations did you have about capital defense? How did that change over time?
It’s very serious and consequential work. And what I learned along the way is that not only do you need to understand the law and how the courts work, but the work is really about the client. To me, I’m representing a client in a case as a lawyer who represents people on death row. My job is not to get rid of the death penalty. My job is to try and convince a court or a clemency board that the death penalty is inappropriate in this case. So, that’s how I’ve approached it.
One of the frustrating things about the work is the way the system is structured, and as a case goes through the judicial process, people think that more judges are looking at the conviction and sentence to make sure that everything that happened was fair.
The reality is that as a case goes through the process, courts are limited as to what they can review, what they can decide. There’s a lot of deference by the courts, to what happened at trial. So that part is frustrating, because you may find something new that is significant, that would have made a difference at trial, but the courts say we cannot look at this because there’s a statute or there’s a U.S. Supreme Court decision, and it’s hard to explain that to the client.

How did you approach your relationship with a client? What does it require?
Trust is key. What you have to be willing to do is spend time talking with and meeting clients. And I want to be clear that this isn’t something that one person does. There’s a team of people there. There may be two or three lawyers on the case. There are investigators, both fact investigators and mitigation investigators. There are paralegals so, you have this team, and you know, you’re all in working for the client, and someone on the team needs to have that connection.
It takes some clients a little longer to trust. There are clients who have mental impairments that make it difficult for them to understand and to trust and to share what they’re thinking. Those are challenges, but it’s just really important to be there for the client.

Any clients in particular stick out in your mind when you reflect back?
I have a client in Ohio that I’ve represented since 1991. In 2000, the state did some DNA testing. They found some biological material, tested it, and hid it from us for 8 years. We get the test results. We eventually get into court. We have a hearing, and the judge decides that case was murder, rape and burglary, and the judge said the state’s theory of trial was it was a single assailant, and since the DNA excludes him from the rape, it excludes him from murder, and vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial.
Eventually, the judge allowed him to be released on bond, so he walked from death row to freedom, and he was living as a free person for 2 11/2 years, did not get in any trouble, went to see his pre-trial service officer when he was supposed to do that. I was in Cleveland, and I got to meet him for lunch at a restaurant and sit across a table. And then, 2 1/2 after he was released, the Ohio Supreme Court decided that the judge who vacated his conviction did not have jurisdiction and reinstated the conviction, and the next day, he was back on death row. And the reason the judge did not have the jurisdiction is that, under Ohio law, the defendant needs to request the DNA testing. Here, the state did it on its own, and then hid the results from us for eight years. We have the results, yeah, and the court, relying on this jurisdictional technicality, sent him back to death row, where he is today.

What is it like to traverse through changing case law?
It’s really sort of surreal. Using this case as an example, he went back to death row in 2018. We filed a clemency application in 2022, we are in federal court. The clemency board in Ohio won’t hear the case. The federal court case has been pending for almost 3 years. And that’s frustrating. It’s frustrating and surreal. And then, being at the end of the line with a client, and trying to litigate issues and getting courts to be interested in those issues, and at the same time trying to prepare the client for what is likely going to happen. There’s a lot of challenges in trying to do that.

On the flip side, when have you had success?
My old office had cases where we walked two people off of death row because of evidence that was withheld by the state. So those were celebrations. But it took the system so long for that to happen. It’s frustrating when people say, well, the system worked, the guy got out, or the system worked, the death penalty was vacated. But it takes a long time for that to happen. We have to be patient and we have to be diligent.

Part of this work is assessing, at the end of the line, how states carry out executions. What have you seen in the way of changes to executions?
Initially, when we started to litigate issues related to the Arizona protocol, the Department of Corrections basically would say, trust us. And what we learned along the way through discovery, through clients being executed, is that we couldn’t trust the Department of Corrections to follow its own protocol.
That was obviously a concern, but we just kept our foot on the gas. I think along the way what has come out is that Arizona’s process is more transparent now than it was in 2010 when I witnessed the first execution here. The public, through the media, gets to see more of the process. And I think the public is more educated on the process. It’s all about transparency and holding our public officials accountable.

In Arizona, we’ve seen some pushes to alter methods of execution, to add the firing squad or reexamine lethal injection. What should the state consider?
I think the solution is life without parole. Because the person who committed the crime is going to be removed from society for the rest of their life. They’re going to be in the custody of the Department of Corrections, and the family members of the victim are not going to be re-traumatized for the next 20, 30, 40 years, because what happens is whenever a case moves from one step to another, the press will write about it. The victims’ advocates are required to notify the family members and they relive the trauma they experienced when they lost their loved one. I think that life without parole is a workable solution. It’s sound public policy.

When you look back on your work, what change do you think you have affected?
What we try to do is give our clients dignity, humanity and to hold our system accountable. If the state decides that it’s going to take the life of one of its citizens, the client deserves all the protections and resources to hold the state accountable.

What should people look out for as the state moves toward another execution?
The bottom line is that the death penalty is about politics, the decision of who is targeted for the death penalty is a political decision by the county attorney. The decision to seek an execution warrant is a political decision by the attorney general. One of the frustrations is that people think that the death penalty is all about justice and fairness, but it’s not. It’s all about politics.

How have you seen the sentiment on executions change over the course of your career?
When I started doing this work, support for the death penalty was about 80% nationally, and we are at a point now where it dips below 50% if life without parole is offered as an alternative to the death penalty. That’s come about because of education, the reporting on all the exonerations from death row, I think they’re at 200 now. And the litigation over the methods of execution where you know people now know that it’s not a guy just laying on a bed and going to sleep, that it’s really a very violent act going on, and I think, a sense of understanding that people change.
A client who committed a horrible, horrible act on the worst day of his life is a different person as time goes on. I have seen clients grow. They’ve turned inward, and there’s this strength that they have. Many of them can’t believe that they did what they did. They simply cannot believe it. They’re not denying it. But, because there were drugs or alcohol or they were mentally impaired at the time, now that they’ve been removed from some of those conditions and getting a little bit of treatment, not doing the drugs and alcohol, they’re different people.

We’re not who we are on the worst day of our life.

https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2026/03/08/dale-baich-in-defense-of-death-row/