Ohio Death Row Inmate Billy Slagle committed suicide on in the early morning hours of August 4, three days before his scheduled execution. An official "after action review report" publicly released yesterday finds the guards did not make their required rounds every 30 minutes as required and that the electronic logs about one guard's rounds that evening were falsified. Videos show the actual time the rounds occurred.

According to the review, DRC officer John McCollister, 30, falsely indicated on the prison's electronic log that Slagle's death row cell was checked consistently in 30-minute intervals, as required by the DRC, during the overnight shift.

The log shows rounds were conducted in the required intervals beginning at 10 p.m. Aug. 3 – when the shift began -- until about 5 a.m. Aug. 4, when Slagle's body was found hanging in the cell. The DRC review states that corrections officer Clay Putnam, 19, conducted the shift's first check on Slagle's cell at 11:20 p.m. and that he completed rounds once every hour beginning just after 2 a.m.

The actual report is available here. It concludes: [More...]