Speaker Mike Flood introduced a bill Thursday that would make lethal injection the means for carrying out the death penalty in Nebraska, but a repeal bill won't be far behind.
JoANNE YOUNG / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Thursday, January 8, 2009 12:00 am
Speaker Mike Flood introduced a bill Thursday that would make lethal injection the means for carrying out the death penalty in Nebraska, but a repeal bill won’t be far behind.
Omaha Sen. Brenda Council said shortly after the bill was introduced she will sponsor a bill to abolish the death penalty.
The Legislature has debated the death penalty three times in the past two years. Those three proposals lost twice in close votes. The margin between supporters and opponents broadened last year.
In 2008, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Nebraska’s electric chair unconstitutional, leaving the state with no way to carry out capital punishment.
This year, the Legislature has 16 new senators to hear the debate again, if Council’s bill would make it to the floor.
Two freshman senators — Tanya Cook of Omaha and Colby Coash of Lincoln — said Thursday that although they are opposed to the death penalty, a lethal injection bill probably needs to be debated. Coash is unofficially on the Judiciary Committee that would decide if the bill would go to the full Legislature.
Lincoln Sen. Amanda McGill, also a Judiciary Committee member, supports repeal, but has not made up her mind about what should be the fate of a lethal injection bill.
“It’s going to be tough,” she said.
On one hand, if the majority of senators support the death penalty, there should be a way to carry it out, she said. On the other hand, she supports repeal of capital punishment in the state.
“I’m looking forward to the hearing and sorting through which of those weighs more heavily,” she said.
At a Thursday press conference, Gov. Dave Heineman said the lethal injection question needs to be resolved during this legislative session.
“This issue is a priority, and Speaker Flood has my full support,” he said.
Flood’s bill proposes a written execution protocol be developed by the state Department of Corrections. Corrections agencies in 22 other states have similar authority.
Heineman said he supports the idea of having the Department of Corrections determine the protocol.
Thirty-six states use lethal injection, with 27 adopting it as their only means of execution.
Last April, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 to reject a challenge by two Kentucky death row inmates who argued the method used in that state was cruel and unusual, and inflicted needless pain and suffering.
Kentucky and at least 29 other states used the same protocol: sodium thiopental to render the inmate unconscious, then pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride to paralyze the inmate and stop the heart.
Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning said his office also recommends using checks to be sure the inmate is unconscious before injecting the second and third drugs. That would include flicking the eyelids and pinching the cheeks, he said, similar checks to those made in hospitals to ensure patients are asleep before surgery is performed.
Flood said he will work with other senators to make sure the bill gets to the floor. The lethal injection bill is an important one that requires a highly thoughtful debate, he said, and as the speaker he is committed to ensuring that is the process followed by senators.
Jill Francke, statewide coordinator of Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty, said her organization sees the lethal injection proposal as more than a “simple procedural vote,” and the Legislature should take time to look at the death penalty itself.
The problems pointed out with the six people recently exonerated in the murder of a Beatrice woman shows innocent people could be condemned to death by the state.
In those cases, the threat of the death penalty was used to extract confessions from the defendants, confessions that later turned out to be false.
But Bruning said the system worked in that case. The six people accused in Beatrice were not put to death. Nebraska has numerous safeguards, he said, including a three-judge panel when considering death and mitigating and aggravating circumstances.
“I believe in our system,” Bruning said. “There’s no doubt the 10 men on death row (in Nebraska) are guilty.”
Francke said she believes lethal injection continues to present a “huge legal quagmire,” despite the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
In that decision, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a concurring opinion saying the question of whether a three-drug protocol similar to Kentucky’s may be used in other states remains open, and may well be answered differently in a future case.
“Instead of ending the controversy, I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol, and specifically about the justification for the use of the paralytic agent, pancuronium bromide, but also about the justification for the death penalty itself,” he said.
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.