COMING BACK TO LIFE AFTER HELL

SOMETIMES, THE WRONG MAN IS CONDEMNED;

SOMETIMES, HE'S RESCUED FROM EXECUTION

That was before he spent nearly six years in the ``living hell'' of Death Row; before he saw just how badly the American system of justice can be abused - and also how it can work, albeit very slowly.

Before his name came to symbolize the single most powerful argument against the death penalty: What if they get the wrong guy?

Johnston is one of only two men to walk away from Ohio's Death Row a free man since 1981, when the current capital punishment statute went into effect. The sentences of eight other Death Row inmates - four men an four women - were commuted to life imprisonment by former Gov. Richard Celeste.

Today, lean and vigorous at 61, Johnston supports himself with free-lance carpentry and construction work in a small town south of Columbus. He lives in a cozy, no-frills one-bedroom apartment with a patio overlooking serene farmland. He keeps company with his Bible and the gray-and-white tabby cat he adopted when his mother died. He loves to tend the impatiens, pinks and pear cactus in his tiered flower bed, to roam the fields and stoop to inspect the ants and bugs.

Tanned, decked out in bluejeans and cowboy boots, he exudes the air of a man at peace with himself and the world.

His opinions about capital punishment, however, have changed.

``People make mistakes - and the death penalty is not reversible,'' he said. `` `Oops, sorry' don't cut it.''

In 1989, the Ohio Supreme Court reversed Johnston's Hocking County conviction for the 1982 mutilation-murders of his stepdaughter, Annette Cooper Johnston, and her fiance, Todd Schultz. Their torsos were found in the Hocking River, and dismembered body parts were unearthed from a nearby cornfield.

The Supreme Court ruled that the trial court improperly permitted testimony by a witness who had been hypnotized and that the prosecution concealed l Johnston evidence favorable to Johnston. Four witnesses were never called who put the scene of the crime in the cornfield, rather than Johnston's farm, as the prosecution contended. The high court also said evidence was suppressed about another suspect in the crime. The slayings remain unsolved.

In his case, Johnston admits, justice prevailed - ``although it was awfully slow.''

He worries that other innocent men on Death Row - ``a small number,'' he concedes - might not be so lucky because of recent changes in state law. In November, voters overwhelmingly approved a measure dropping one step in the appeals process for Death Row inmates.

``Justice worked in my case because my attorneys made it work,'' he said. ``If they hadn't been so diligent, I would still be on Death Row.''

Like Johnston, Robert Domer of Canton walked away from Death Row when his murder conviction was overturned on appeal in 1971.

``Fearsome place, I'll tell you,'' he said of L Block at the old Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. ``There are very few nights I don't think about that.''

Domer, convicted of killing a hitchhiker in 1963, became an ardent death-penalty foe after he was freed. He recently resigned from Ohioans to Stop Executions, for health reasons.

He's disturbed by the ``rush to judgment'' in capital cases, and said recent changes in state law that shorten the appeals process eliminate the safeguards that freed him.

``It was the appellate court that reversed my conviction,'' he said. ``Now that couldn't happen, as it did in my case.''

Opponents of the death penalty feel shortening the appeals process makes it more likely that innocent people will be executed.

``This is a person's life at stake,'' said Karen Burkhart , Ohio death-penalty abolition coordinator for the human-rights group Amnesty International. ``I don't think we want to risk life so we can speed up retribution.''

Death-penalty foes say wrongful convictions such as Johnston's and Domer's happen often enough to make capital punishment unacceptable.

They point to a 1993 report by a congressional subcommittee that shows at least 48 people have been released from death rows across the country since 1973. Only four of the 48 were convicted of lesser charges; the other 44 were acquitted, pardoned or had charges dropped.

``Judging by past experience, a substantial number of Death Row inmates are indeed innocent, and there is a high risk that some of them will be executed,'' the report said. ``Once an execution occurs, the error is final.''

One of those cases involved an Ohioan, Gary Beeman of Ashtabula, convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to death in 1976. He was ``acquitted at retrial (in 1979) when evidence showed that the true killer was the main prosecution witness at the first trial,'' the report said.

Domer's case is among the cases featured in the 1992 book In Spite of Innocence , published by Northeastern University Press. The book, by university professors Michael Radelet and Hugo Bedau and writer Constance Putnam, looks at the stories of nearly 400 people the authors say were wrongly convicted of capital or potentially capital cases from 1900 to 1991. Twenty-one were from Ohio.

The authors say at least 23 innocent people, none of them Ohioans, have been executed in the United States in this century.

Johnston walked away with his life but lost virtually everything else: his 53-acre Hocking County farm, his life savings, his marriage.

Financially devastated by his legal battle, Johnston doesn't ever expect to retire. He lost a $1 million wrongful-imprisonment lawsuit in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.

Although his wife, Sarah, Annette's mother, steadfastly believed in his innocence, the couple divorced while Johnston was in prison. ``The marriage broke up because Sarah needed someone she could reach out and touch,'' Johnston said.

Instead, the couple could only press hands against a Plexiglas window during visits at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, where Johnston spent six years on Death Row. Visits were confined to ``wire cages three feet by three feet, with the doors locked between you,'' Johnston recalled. ``You had to yell through the Plexiglas, and anybody could hear you.''

The ``orientation'' to Death Row was like stepping into a horror chamber for a man who had never been in jail before. Johnston was stripped, searched and thrown into a cell.

``In prison, every day a man wakes up, he's one day closer to getting out,'' Johnston said. ``On Death Row, every day you get up you're one day closer to being put to death.''

He had spent his life in Greene County and retired to bucolic Hocking County. Now his peers were inmates who revealed such things as ``I shot the woman because she wore tight pants;'' who often, among themselves, casually confessed to their crimes or made weak denials.

In his early years on Death Row, Johnston estimated, inmates averaged 23 hours and 37 minutes a day in their cells. They left their cells three times a week to shower, and once a week to pace the cellblock for an hour.

``If people really want revenge, they should keep men alive as long as they can in the conditions on Death Row,'' Johnston said.

Fresh fruit was prohibited because it clogged the drains, according to Johnston; pork chops were forbidden because an inmate once stabbed a guard with a bone.

He launched extensive letter-writing campaigns, filed endless grievances and persuaded other inmates to do the same, preaching that the pen is mightier than the sword. Still, he always feared an insurrection like the 1993 Lucasville prison riot that took place three years after he won his freedom. Death Row has since been moved to Mansfield Correctional Institution.

``The riot came as no surprise to me,'' he said. ``It was the wrong thing to do, but you can only treat men like dogs for so long before they bite you.''

Gradually Johnston saw inmates win increased privileges: Bible study, libraries, jobs, fresh fruit , outside recreation. ``After four years of being confined, touching nothing but cement, you stumbled on the ground,'' he recalled.

Johnston didn't stumble when he at last won his freedom. ``I found out when the other inmates started pounding on my cell: `They reversed you!'

``My thoughts? It's about time. I fully expected the day would come when they would have to open the door,'' he said.

Johnston left prison ``without a penny in my pocket'' but managed to support himself and care for his mother in her last two years.

``I surprise a lot of people when I say I cannot regret what happened, other than the death of my daughter,'' Johnston said. ``Most of what I lost could be put in the category of toys: sleighs, campers, bridles. That's all gone, history, all lost.

``But I look at life differently than before. My faith has definitely been strengthened. I never asked God, `Why me?' My answer is, `Why not me?' ''

He feels more sympathy, more compassion, even for those society would cast aside and condemn to death.

``Some of the men on Death Row are very difficult to defend,'' he said, ``but they are humans, and I don't feel man has the right to take the life of another human, period.

``Life is too sacred, too valuable, to take it flippantly.''

Before: ASSOCIATED PRESS

In a 1982 photo, Dale Johnston and then-wife Sarah (above) wait while police search for the bodies of Annette Cooper-Johnston and Todd Schultz (pictured at left).

Exonerated:

Dale Johnston was on Death Row for 6 years before his conviction was overturned. `I surprise a lot of people when I say I cannot regret what happened, other than the death of my daughter,' he said. `I look at life differently than before.'