The Ohio public defender emphasizes that Nicole Diar of Lorain County is not close to execution. But she could become the first woman executed since Betty Butler from Hamilton County on June 11, 1954.

In fact, only two of 27 inmates whose cases were reviewed Tuesday by the public defender's legal staff -- Richard Wade Cooey II of Summit County and Kenneth Biros of Trumbull County -- are close to making the trip to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville, where the state has executed 26 men since 1999, officials said.

Public Defender Tim Young said August is the earliest he envisions another execution. The last person executed in the state was Christopher J. Newton on May 24, 2007.

Young said the cases being reviewed are at various stages of the lengthy appeals process. Some are nearing the end of several rounds of legal challenges, while others are not nearly as close.

Diar, three men from Franklin County and one from Marion County are in that second tier of cases affected by a U.S. Supreme Court decision last week. The court refused to consider an appeal by Cooey and Biros challenging a timing provision of the lethal injection process. A total of 25 other inmates joined the rejected appeal.

The public defender estimated that about 17 cases are in the first tier, meaning their appeal process is limited, but not yet over.

The Supreme Court ruling, coupled with a decision the previous week upholding lethal injection, has prosecutors and defense attorneys scrambling to get up to speed on a backlog of capital punishment cases. Ohio and most other states were under an unofficial moratorium awaiting the court ruling on lethal injection, the execution method used by all states.

Diar was convicted and sentenced to death for suffocating her son, Jacob, 4, on Aug. 27, 2003. She set fire to her home to try to hide the evidence. The boy's burned body was found on his bed next to his dead puppy.

Of the 369 Ohio inmates executed since 1897, only three were women. Two women are among the 184 current Death Row prisoners. Both are at the Ohio Reformatory for Woman at Marysville.

Also on the second-tier list:

• James T. Conway of Franklin County, who has two murder convictions for killing Andrew Dotson in September 2001 and Jason Gervais in January 2002.

• Jonathan D. Monroe of Franklin County, sentenced to death for killing two women, Travinna Simmons and Deccarla Quincy, on April 17, 1996.

• Michael R. Turner of Franklin County, who killed his estranged wife, Jennifer Lyles Turner, and her boyfriend at her Reynoldsburg apartment on June 12, 2001.

• Maurice Mason of Marion County, who raped and murdered Robin Dennis on Feb. 8, 1993.

Zach Swisher, head of the criminal section for Attorney General Marc Dann, said he doesn't know how many cases will be affected by the decision on Cooey.

"We're not in a situation where all of sudden there's going to be executions," Swisher said. "There's still some litigation that has to take place."

Swisher said the attorney general is working with county prosecutors, Gov. Ted Strickland's office, who handles clemency, and the Ohio Supreme Court, which ultimately sets execution dates, to see which cases should move forward.

ajohnson@dispatch.com