Mike DeWine

DeWine was born in Springfield, Ohio, on January 5, 1947, and grew up in nearby Yellow Springs. He is the son of Jean Ruth (née Liddle) and Richard Lee DeWine. He was raised and identifies as a Roman Catholic. DeWine earned a Bachelor of Science degree in education from Miami University in 1969 and a Juris Doctor from Ohio Northern University College of Law in 1972.

At age 25, DeWine started working as an assistant prosecuting attorney for Greene County, Ohio, and in 1976 he was elected county prosecutor, serving four years.

In 1980, DeWine was elected to the Ohio State Senate and served one two-year term.

In 1982, U.S. representative Bud Brown of Ohio's 7th congressional district retired after 18 years in Congress; his father, Clarence Brown, Sr., had held the seat for 26 years before that. DeWine won the Republican nomination, assuring his election in November. He was reelected three more times from this district, which stretched from his home in Springfield to the Columbus suburbs. He ran unopposed in 1986 in what was regarded as a bad year for Republicans nationally.

In 1986, DeWine was one of the House impeachment managers who prosecuted the case in the impeachment trial of Judge Harry E. Claiborne. Claiborne was found guilty by the United States Senate and removed from his federal judgeship.

DeWine did not seek reelection to the House of Representatives in 1990, and briefly ran for governor, but withdrew before the primaries and instead ran for lieutenant governor as George Voinovich's running mate in that year's Ohio gubernatorial election. The Voinovich–DeWine ticket was easily elected.

DeWine lives in the Whitelaw Reid House. He married Frances Struewing on June 3, 1967, and they have had eight children together. Their daughter Rebecca died at the age of 22 on August 4, 1993, in a car accident. One of their sons, Pat DeWine, is an Ohio Supreme Court Justice. Another son, Brian, is the president of the Minor League Baseball team the Asheville Tourists; the DeWine family purchased the team in 2010. DeWine's second cousin, Kevin DeWine, is the former Ohio Republican Party chairman.

Abortion

In April 2019, DeWine signed House Bill 493, known as the Ohio "Heartbeat Bill", into law, prohibiting abortion after a heartbeat is detected in a fetus, with no exceptions for cases of rape and incest, imposing one of the nation's most extensive abortion restrictions. DeWine opposes abortion. In the Senate, he was the lead sponsor of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act and voted for the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003. In December 2020, DeWine signed a bill that said "fetal remains from surgical abortions in Ohio must be cremated or buried"; failure to do so would be a misdemeanor of the first degree.

November 2023 Ohio Issue 1 overturned Ohio's abortion ban.

Capital punishment

A leader of Ohio's ACLU chapter, which opposes capital punishment, has called the death penalty "a legacy issue" for DeWine. As a state senator in the 1980s, DeWine helped write the legislation that reinstated Ohio's death penalty following a nationwide moratorium. Although Catholic, DeWine did not join the Pope and Catholic bishops in openly opposing the death penalty; as governor, he avoided stating his views on the capital punishment for most of his tenure. In late May 2026, DeWine endorsed Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy; Ramaswamy supports capital punishment "only in the most egregious cases," while his opponent, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, said she would continue DeWine's moratorium on capital punishment.

On June 16, 2026, DeWine voiced support for abolishing the death penalty in Ohio; this stance differs from that of most other Republicans. It also differs from DeWine's previous stance on the death penalty, as he was once a proponent of capital punishment. In a statement on June 16, 2026, DeWine said he no longer believes the death penalty serves as a deterrent to murder and that the "moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists". He discussed the harmful effect the decades-long delays in administering the death penalty had on murder victims' families, as well as the harmful psychological effects prison workers experienced from participating in executions, particularly botched ones. He called on state legislators to abolish the death penalty and also noted that voters had the power to amend the state constitution with ballot measures. Several Ohio lawmakers and candidates reacted to DeWine's proposal to end the death penalty in Ohio, with Ramaswamy and Ohio Attorney General candidate Keith Faber expressing their opposition with DeWine's abolitionist stance. Several other politicians and figures, including some Republicans, Ohio's former DRC director, and Democratic state senator Nickie Antonio, expressed their support of DeWine's stance and acknowledged the evolution his position had undergone over the years.

No executions have been conducted in Ohio since DeWine took office, and he stated he had delayed all executions due to "ongoing problems involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC)"; before he announced his opposition to capital punishment, he said he was postponing executions in the interest of ensuring non-condemned Ohioans can use state-run programs to access the same drugs as those in Ohio's lethal injection cocktail. DeWine proposed that if his successors want to reinstate Ohio's death penalty, they should consider passing a "shield law" to keep pharmaceutical suppliers from finding out that the DRC used their drugs for executions. Every time an execution date has been scheduled during DeWine's tenure as governor, he has granted executive clemency postponing it for several years. Ohio has thus had a de facto death penalty moratorium since 2019.

In 2020, a reporter asked DeWine a question that implied DeWine was a death penalty proponent, and DeWine responded, "I didn't say that. I said I am following the law in Ohio [regarding capital punishment]." In the same answer, he implied that he disagreed with the common moral justification for capital punishment that it serves as a deterrent, considering that it takes decades for Ohio death row inmates to complete their appeals. DeWine also proposed that lawmakers legalize other methods of execution, but declined to offer suggestions. He said the death penalty was not a priority for the state, adding, "We're not going to execute anyone under the status quo." In December 2024, DeWine told a crowd of reporters, "We've not had any executions since I've been governor. We will not as long as I'm governor."

In late 2025, DeWine announced that he would use part of his final State of the State address to give his personal position on capital punishment; he said he would write his statement over Christmas and would have something to say the next month. But in January 2026, a spokesman said that DeWine had "no new public statements beyond his previous comments." Reporters previously speculated that DeWine would use the address to announce that he did not support the death penalty. His March 2026 State of the State address did not mention the subject. In a May 2026 forum discussing his endorsement of Ramaswamy and other issues, DeWine said he found the response to his upcoming statement overblown, but also confirmed he would deliver his remarks soon: "I don't want to build this up because I'm going to do it shortly, and I think there's been a lot of hype about this, but there really shouldn't be. It'll simply be Mike DeWine reflecting on the death penalty."

In 2025 and 2026, fellow Republican lawmakers in Ohio, including Attorney General Dave Yost and House Speaker Matt Huffman, expressed concern that DeWine might commute all death sentences before he leaves office in 2027. Yost and Huffman also confirmed that the predominantly Republican Ohio state legislature largely supports the death penalty and would not cooperate with any legislative efforts to abolish it. In his June 2026 statement announcing his opposition to the death penalty, DeWine noted that he and Huffman had discussed their opposing stances on the issue. Meanwhile, death penalty abolitionists have said they want DeWine to commute all the state's death sentences to life without parole, which would allow him to circumvent legislative resistance to ending capital punishment. In December 2019, DeWine said he believed the future of capital punishment should be up to citizen voters and legislators. Death penalty supporters have criticized DeWine's moratorium as expensive to uphold and denying closure to victims' families, while death penalty opponents have encouraged DeWine to abolish capital punishment due to racial discrimination, innocence cases, and geographical arbitrariness. As of 2026, there are over 108 inmates on Ohio's death row, many of whom have received reprieves from DeWine. DeWine has not said whether he will commute all active death sentences before leaving office.