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Thread: Carey Dean Moore - Nebraska Execution - August 14, 2018

  1. #11
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    Attorney general files opposition to request for delaying Moore execution

    The Nebraska Attorney General's Office filed a response Wednesday opposing a request to postpone the June 14 execution of death-row inmate Carey Dean Moore.

    Jerry Soucie, a lawyer with the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy, asked the state Supreme Court for the stay of execution Tuesday while a Douglas County District Court considers his motion challenging the state's purchase of one of the three lethal-injection drugs in its execution protocol.

    Soucie also is challenging Nebraska's lethal-injection law, which was passed in 2009 after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

    Soucie says lawmakers unconstitutionally allowed the Department of Correctional Services to set a lethal-injection protocol and exceeded their authority by passing a law that changed Moore's sentence from death by electrocution to lethal injection.

    Solicitor General J. Kirk Brown said Moore's conviction and sentence have been affirmed and that "absent a factual circumstance whereby the judgment is void or voidable under the state or U.S. constitution, the court has no jurisdiction" to grant a stay.

    Soucie is challenging the legality of Nebraska's purchase from an Indian company, Kayem Pharmaceutical Pvt. Ltd., of one of the drugs and is questioning whether the state even bought the right substance.

    Soucie said Nebraska law does not allow the state to obtain lethal-injection drugs from sources not registered with the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

    But the state's lethal-injection protocol calls for using sodium thiopental. Soucie said it appears that the state might have bought a generic version of the drug, which is not called for in the lethal-injection protocol.

    Moore, 53, has been on death row since 1980. He was sentenced to die for killing Omaha cab drivers Maynard D. Helgeland and Reuel Eugene Van Ness during botched robberies in 1979.

    The state has not executed an inmate since Robert Williams died in the electric chair in 1997.

    http://journalstar.com/news/local/cr...cdf9a5ca7.html

  2. #12
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    Moore must explain need to stop Neb. execution

    OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — An attorney for Nebraska death row inmate Carey Dean Moore has been given two weeks to explain why a Douglas County district judge should stop his June 14 execution.

    Jerry Soucie is challenging the state's purchase of one of the three drugs used in its lethal-injection protocol. He questions the legality of Nebraska's purchase from an Indian company and whether the state bought the right substance.

    The Lincoln Journal Star reports a hearing on the challenge was held Tuesday in Omaha. The judge gave Soucie until June 7 to respond to a filing from the Nebraska attorney general's office, which says such a challenge should be heard in federal court.

    The Nebraska Supreme Court last month rejected a similar appeal by Soucie and ordered Moore to be executed.

    http://www.newstimes.com/default/art...#ixzz1NNHKEJXr

  3. #13
    Nebraska is so soft. This is one thing I always hated about states that are reluctant to carry out death sentences. Stays are issued to frequently for appeals that hold no merit and are nothing more then a mere delay tactic at best.

    Supreme Court issues stay of Moore's execution

    The Nebraska Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a stay of the June 14 execution of death-row inmate Carey Dean Moore.

    Jerry Soucie, a lawyer with the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy, asked for the stay while a Douglas County District Court judge considers a motion he filed challenging the purchase of one of the three lethal-injection drugs.

    District Judge Thomas Otepka has given Soucie until June 7 to respond to a brief submitted by J. Kirk Brown, solicitor general in the attorney general's office, saying Moore's appeal is without merit.

    Soucie also is challenging Nebraska's lethal-injection law, which was passed in 2009 after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

    Soucie said lawmakers unconstitutionally allowed the Department of Correctional Services to set a lethal-injection protocol and exceeded their authority by passing a law that changed Moore's sentence from death by electrocution to lethal injection.

    Brown said Moore's conviction and sentence have been affirmed and "absent a factual circumstance whereby the judgment is void or voidable under the state or U.S. constitution, the court has no jurisdiction" to grant a stay.

    Soucie is challenging the legality of Nebraska's purchase from an Indian company, Kayem Pharmaceutical Pvt. Ltd., of one of the drugs and is questioning whether the state even bought the right substance.

    Soucie said Nebraska law does not allow the state to obtain lethal-injection drugs from sources not registered with the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

    The state's lethal-injection protocol calls for using sodium thiopental. Soucie said it appears the state might have bought a generic version of the drug, which is not called for in the lethal-injection protocol.

    Moore, 53, has been on death row since 1980. He was sentenced to die for killing Omaha cab drivers Maynard D. Helgeland and Reuel Eugene Van Ness during botched robberies in 1979.

    The state has not executed an inmate since Robert Williams died in the electric chair in 1997.

    http://journalstar.com/news/local/cr...88e9f4da2.html


    "Soucie said lawmakers unconstitutionally allowed the Department of Correctional Services to set a lethal-injection protocol and exceeded their authority by passing a law that changed Moore's sentence from death by electrocution to lethal injection."

    LOL! Right, and if they kept electrocution Soucie would be arguing that it's inhumane and they should have lethal injection like the other 37 states.

  4. #14
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    Moore Execution Delayed

    LINCOLN, Neb. -- The Nebraska Supreme Court has delayed the June 14 execution of Carey Dean Moore.

    In April, the court set the date for the state's first execution in 13 years. But Moore's lawyer, Jerry Soucie, is challenging the state's purchase of one of the three drugs used in its lethal-injection protocol. He questions the legality of Nebraska's purchase from an Indian company and whether the state bought the right substance.

    The execution is being delayed so the appeal can be heard.

    The 53-year-old Moore was sentenced to death for the 1979 murders of two Omaha cabbies. He was convicted of first-degree murder for killing Maynard D. Helgeland and Reuel Eugene Van Ness in botched robberies.

    http://www.ketv.com/news/28024360/de...#ixzz1NSJffxw8

  5. #15
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    Execution stayed; debate continues

    Lincoln, NE – Three years after the state Supreme Court ruled the electric chair could no longer be used, Carey Dean Moore’s execution has been stayed by the Nebraska Supreme Court. The Court made the ruling May 25, 2011, after Moore challenged the use of an imported drug in the state’s new lethal injection cocktail.

    The case and debate over the method to be used for capital punishment in the state now stretches over three decades. In fact, it’s one of the most controversial and fascinating legal and ethical discussions underway.

    In the summer of 1979, Carey Dean Moore murdered two cab drivers in Omaha within a week. Since his conviction he has been on Nebraska’s death row. At one point even made his own request to have the State proceed with his execution. Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning told NET News that he finds it “unbelievable that any case can languish for 32 years in the courts.” Bruning, who as a State Senator helped craft the state’s current laws on capital punishment believes waiting any longer is an unfair burden on those the two victims left behind since “the families of the two men who were killed have had to wait this long for justice.”

    When Moore was convicted he was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Nebraska was the only state left to rely on electrocution as the sole means for capital punishment. The chair was replaced by death by way of lethal injection in 2009.

    The use of prescription drugs to carry out executions poses a variety of challenges the state never faced using electrocution or even hanging before that. Major drug companies like Hospira have decided to withdraw products from the market rather than have them used in the execution process. It is a decision that indicates, according to one company representative talking on background to NET News, that these firms are uncomfortable with the ethical issues raised by drugs created for healing being used to end life. They also don’t care for the publicity and political pressure brought on by providing the drugs to states executing prisoners.

    In Nebraska, the execution team includes at least two people trained in administering drugs intravenously. It won’t be a doctor, an anesthesiologist or a nurse. The professional organizations for those specialties including the American Medical Association and The American Nurses Association forbid members from participating in executions. It violates their code of ethics. All take an oath not to harm patients. In a position statement released in 2010 , the Nurses Association took a firm stand against any form of assistance in executions, even including helping maintain equipment or handling supplies used in the process. The paper stated: “The ANA recognizes that the endorsement of the death penalty remains a personal decision and that individual nurses may have views that are different from the official position of the profession. Regardless of the personal opinion of the nurse on the appropriateness of capital punishment, it is a breach of the ethical traditions of nursing, and the Code of Ethics to participate in taking the life of any person. The fact that capital punishment is currently supported in many segments of society does not override the obligation of nurses to uphold the ethical mandates of the profession.”

    Amy Haddad, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Ethics at Creighton University , explains that for health care professionals object to making it seem as if using drugs makes an execution “a medical procedure” adding “it’s kind of a quasi-medical procedure and I think that’s where the problems come in.”

    Haddad points out there maybe more leeway for a Pharmacist to be involved in obtaining and preparing the dosage of the drugs to be used for executions. The professional group for Pharmacists leaves participation in capital punishment up to individual members. There are still two distinct points of view. “Everything in Pharmacy school is directed towards the most beneficial use of all these very dangerous substances to help benefit the patient,” Haddad told NET News. “You kind of have people saying there’s kind of a conflict there with being involved using these substances for a completely contrary purpose.”

    The interim director of Pharmacy at the Nebraska State Penitentiary did take part in procuring the sodium thiopental from the supplier in India. While not commenting on that decision to assist, it does underscore that However some Pharmacists find their participation not only ethical but humane. Ethicist Amy Haddad points out that “sounds kind of like an oxymoron to be interested in the well being of someone who is going to be executed but it focuses on that if the aim is execution than we shouldn’t add unnecessary pain and suffering. When in fact that is why we moved to lethal injection.

    Records released by the Nebraska Department of Corrections and reviewed by NET News show the execution team has been selected by the Department of Corrections. Their identities, by law, are a closely held secret. Attorney General Bruning says that as that team underwent training “we have not had to reinvent the wheel” since Corrections consulted other state prison systems with experience using this process. “There is a community among the states where best practices have evolved,” Bruning told NET News.

    With no medical professionals able to take part, the execution team is made up of prison employees. The documents released by the state’s prison system give some insight into training received by the team. The records, with the names blacked out, indicate at least three people attended classes and earned certificates as Emergency Medical Technicians. Additional courses were completed out of state in a New York based nursing program. State Senator Brenda Council of Omaha, who, along with two other state senators, requested Corrections provided the documents, continues to have concerns. “What we suspect is occurring,” Council says, “is these individuals are being enrolled in a standard EMS class as opposed to a specific training protocol being developed for lethal injection.

    The Senator, a long time opponent of any form of capital punishment, argues that minimal training risks the drugs being administered in a way that could cause suffering. The United State Supreme Court has ruled that any method of execution must not be “cruel or unusual punishment.” Council adds “if didn’t matter how death was accomplished, we’d still have firing squads, we’d still have hangings, we’d still have Ol’ Sparky,” the nickname for the state’s recently retired electric chair.

    Nebraska’s source of one of the three drugs used in the execution process has also been challenged. Sodium Thiopental is the anesthetic used to put the prisoner to sleep. All drug companies in America stopped making it, in part to avoid selling it to prisons for executions. Nebraska got a shipment from Kayam, a small generic drug maker in Mumbai, India. Once publicity about the sale made international headlines, the company stopped selling the drug when used for executions.

    “Nebraska spearheaded the effort to go to India,” according to Sophie Walker, an investigator with the international anti-death penalty organization Reprieve. Speaking with NET News from her office in London, Walker pointed out that the United States Supreme Court has called Sodium Thiopental “the most important drug” in the execution process since “it is the anesthetic and without the anesthetic, the execution is cruel and unusual punishment.”

    Walker’s research on Kayam is now central to Carey Dean Moore’s argument that his execution be postponed. Legal briefs question the purity of the drug. Moore’s attorneys have been instructed by the convicted man not to speak to the press and would not explain their objections. Sophie Walker claims no execution should proceed unless it’s clear the drug has been tested for quality and purity. “It’s a matter of making sure the drug is a viable drug,” she explains, and the state should know “every single step that drug took before it came to the prison” to assure its both effective and would not cause undue suffering. Walker told NET News “the issues that are being raised in Carey Moore’s stay for an execution is that we don’t have all those answers and without all those answers we risk having an unconstitutional execution.”

    The Department of Corrections won’t comment beyond the short prepared statements it’s made defending the acquisition. Attorney General Bruning was cautious in his comments. “I don’t want to get into all the details about that because of the risk of pending litigation.” However he went on to say “as someone who helped write the law when we changed from electrocution to lethal injection I am confident that our protocol and our law is constitutional.”

    As of now, thirty five states and the United States government use lethal injection to execute those facing the death penalty. In the past 30 years over a thousand people have been put to death using the method. However, there is no current standard operating procedure to carry out an execution by lethal injection. It is up to each individual state to develop and oversee its own process.

    http://www.kvnonews.com/2011/05/exec...ate-continues/

  6. #16
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    Neb. Supreme Court Refuses To Pull Execution Stay

    The Nebraska Supreme Court has denied the state's request to reconsider a stay of execution for Carey Dean Moore.

    Last month, the state's high court issued an order staying what was to be Nebraska's first execution using lethal injection, giving attorneys for Moore a chance to challenge one of the execution drugs on appeal.

    The Nebraska Attorney General's office submitted a motion asking the state Supreme Court to reconsider the stay. On Wedneday, the high court denied that request without comment.

    http://www.ketv.com/news/28173936/de...#ixzz1OivDw1i0

  7. #17
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    31 years into death sentence, Moore says he is repentant, tired

    Carey Dean Moore has spent more time on death row than any other Nebraska inmate. He's had several executions stayed. But he faces the inevitability of death -- he can't run from it, he says, and he can't hide from it, either.

    TECUMSEH -- Carey Dean Moore speaks in a matter-of-fact tone.

    "Today," he says on June 14, "I would have been executed."

    When the day you are set to die comes and goes, Moore said, you are not left with a sense of invincibility. Instead, there is more time to think about the end, and the events that led him to where he is.

    When he was a teenager, Moore's thoughts often turned to death, too.

    "I thought about what it would be like to kill somebody," Moore said. "That sounds horrible, but it's true."

    These were not thoughts he shared with others, he said.

    "I did not have any trust for anyone."

    At his sentencing hearing in 1980, three of Moore's siblings told a three-judge panel how badly his father beat him with electric cords and leather straps as a child. He was in and out of foster homes and often in trouble in the years before he became a murderer, they said.

    Moore quickly dismissed any distrust and harsh upbringing as excuses for what he did.

    "When I killed the two men, that was my responsibility, my fault," he said. "The devil didn't make me do it. That was just me."

    * * *

    At 25, Moore argued that he was under the influence of tranquilizers and deserved a new trial. At 27, he tried and failed to escape death row by trading clothes with his then-incarcerated twin brother, David. Through his 30s, he challenged the language of Nebraska's statutes regarding aggravating circumstances in the capital punishment law. A federal court vacated his death sentence in 1994, but he was re-sentenced to death in 1995. Now Moore's case is cited in the annotations of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances statute under a section that expands upon the definition of "exceptional depravity."

    Thirty-one years have passed since Moore first was sentenced to death, on June 20, 1980, for shooting and killing Omaha cab drivers Reuel Van Ness Jr., and Maynard Helgeland, both 47.

    Moore remains on death row, by far the longest-serving inmate of the 11 men sentenced to die in Nebraska.

    "I am very much tired of death-row life," said Moore, 53. "I don't want anyone to think, ‘Poor me.'

    "I am guilty."

    * * *

    During an interview with the Journal Star, Moore was willing to answer every question asked of him but one. While he frequently admitted his guilt, said often that he wished he had not involved his younger brother, Donald, then 14, in the first shooting, he would not chronicle what happened. When asked to, he simply said, "No."

    Moore has detailed the killings in a small pamphlet he wrote on July 4, 2007, a little over two months after the execution date he did not challenge was stayed. In the pamphlet, Moore describes how he came to believe that "God has a special work for me to do yet, before he calls me home to be with him forever."

    "Let me ask you a most serious question," he wrote. "Don't you need a loving personal Savior, even One who accepts you and who will love you and forgive you no matter what you have thought about or what you have done or will do?!

    "I do!"

    Of his crimes, he wrote this:

    "A long time ago, I was two months from being 22 years old when on August 22, 1979 I brought along my 14 year old brother with me when we robbed a cab driver; as soon as this man stopped his car, I pointed my 32 automatic gun at the back of his head and said that I wanted his money. Instantly, he reached back to take the gun from me but it fired even quicker! One bullet went through his hand, another bullet near his spine, and another bullet hit his head; and then in the silence I heard his words that echo in my heart today, ‘Okay, okay, I quit.'

    "But it was simply too late for this man, and it was too late for us as well to turn back the clock of life; I told Donny to put his body on the parking lot ground as I busied myself wiping down the back seat area to get rid of our fingerprints; we drove off leaving him to die by himself. Today, I wonder, was Jesus there, comforting this hurt man in his last minute or two before he shut his eyes to this life for ever? This man's name is Reuel Van Ness, Jr. And my name is Carey Dean Moore. I am a murderer!

    "Five nights later on the 27th, I had to foolishly prove to myself that I could take a man's life all by myself; I entered another cab, and when he stopped at my destination I shot three bullets into this second man, right in his head. His name is Maynard Helgeland. On the 29th, Donny was apprehended; a couple hours later, so was I."

    * * *

    While on death row, Moore said, he has become a born-again Christian. His pastor, Geoff Gonifas of Wheatland, Wyo., says Moore's conversion is genuine.

    Gonifas first agreed to meet Moore in 2005, after praying for three months about whether to go to the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution to meet a death row inmate for the first time in his life.

    Gonifas said he had consulted with prisoners before and found that they often had ulterior motives for seeking his counsel. "But (Moore) had absolutely none," he said.

    Who Gonifas found, he said, was a personable man who not only is remorseful but also repentant for his crimes. During his first visit, Gonifas said, Moore wept as he told him of the killings.

    Since then, he said, they correspond frequently, study the Bible and have prayed together often. In Moore, Gonifas said, he has found a brother in Christ.

    "People may find that hard to accept, but I'm afraid it's true," Gonifas said.

    Four years ago, Moore told his attorneys to stop fighting, and said he was ready to die. He dropped his remaining appeals.

    Moore had been transported from Tecumseh to the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln. He had prepared his last words. He knew he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes combined with his twin brother's when he dies and have them scattered together.

    "I don't want to be contained in a box anymore," he said.

    But the Nebraska State Supreme Court on May 2, 2007, began the process that would result in the elimination of the electric chair and granted him a stay of execution.

    "I was very angry with God for about a year, and I was confused," Moore said. "Very confused. I mean, I gave up my appeals.

    "There has to be a reason God stopped it."

    * * *

    On May 25, the Nebraska State Supreme Court granted Moore his most recent stay of execution. He is not asking for his death sentence to be commuted, but allowed his attorneys to seek the stay based in part on what he and they say is the questionable purchase of one of the three drugs required to perform a lethal injection. It was granted while the drug purchase and other legal issues are challenged in a case filed in Douglas County District Court.

    "For some odd reason, I allowed my attorneys to fight it," Moore said. "They are very dedicated, dependable people."

    His best guess, Moore said, is that he will not be executed unless Nebraska officials seek a substitute for the drug state officials bought from a pharmaceutical company in India to inject into him.

    "It seems like they should have had warning that they'd have a problem," Moore said. "Someone, or all of them, must be incompetent."

    The state, in court filings, has argued that Moore's allegation is speculative at best.

    "Moore also makes no allegation or showing that the sodium thiopental in (Nebraska Department of Correctional Services) possession is not, in fact, sodium thiopental and offers nothing more than rank speculation that the sodium thiopental in the possession of DCS is not capable of performing the function for which it is intended under the DCS Execution Protocol," the filing reads. A spokeswoman with the Nebraska Attorney General's Office said the state's brief regarding Moore's stay of execution request speaks for itself.

    * * *

    Moore said he spends about 20 hours a day alone in his cell on a typical day. He reads. He prays. Especially around the holidays, he said, he prays for the families of the two men he killed.

    "It must be very hard on them," he said.

    Even though he received his most recent stay three weeks before the set execution date, Moore said he counted down the days until June 14. He compared his situation to that of someone diagnosed with terminal cancer. He cannot run from death, he said, and he cannot hide from it.

    "You might as well just think about it," Moore said. "Even if I am executed a year from now, or two years, or never, I guess that's up to God."

    http://journalstar.com/news/local/cr...#ixzz1QUtS9Y1k

  8. #18
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    Attorney: Moore death sentence should be vacated because state withheld information

    An attorney for Nebraska death-row inmate Carey Dean Moore plans to ask that his client's death sentence be vacated because state officials withheld information about problems with the lethal injection drug they bought from India.

    The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in April that the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services did not have a license to import the drug and could not use it.

    State Attorney General Jon Bruning's office continued to push for an execution date for Moore even though it knew -- but did not publicize -- that it could not use the drug, said attorney Jerry Soucie of the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy.

    "Moore needs to research whether the actions of the state in withholding essential facts regarding the supply of thiopental held by DCS and the inability of DCS to carry out a lethal injection constituted a 'sham' execution," Soucie wrote in documents filed Thursday in Douglas County District Court. "This might serve as a new and independent grounds for relief from Moore's death sentences under the Eighth and/or Fourteenth Amendments."

    It appears that Moore was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment by being allowed to believe he might die on June 14, Soucie said. He also said Moore might have been denied his right of due process.

    "The state pursuing an execution warrant without the current capability to conduct the execution could have no other effect that to subject Moore to unnecessary uncertainty, suffering and psychological torture regarding his fate," Soucie wrote. "It is my intention to make the conduct by the state an additional ground to have his death sentence vacated under the Eighth Amendment in the amended postconviction motion.

    "The state's legal representative let Moore, the Nebraska Supreme Court, the victims' families and the people of the state of Nebraska operate under the false impression that DCS could carry out Moore's execution on June 14," Soucie said.

    Moore had been scheduled to be executed then, but the state Supreme Court issued a stay while Soucie challenged the drug purchase by the state.

    The Corrections Department said in December that it had paid $2,056 to Kayem Pharmaceutical Pvt. Ltd. of India for 500 grams of sodium thiopental. The drug has been in short supply since last year, when the only U.S. manufacturer, Hospira Inc., said it was ending production because of death-penalty opposition overseas.

    Corrections officials since have obtained an import license but have not purchased a new supply of the drug, which is part of the three-drug cocktail in the lethal injection protocol.

    A hearing on Soucie's request for time to amend his appeal is set for July 13.

    The Journal Star reported earlier that court documents show a lawyer with the Corrections Department was told via an email from the DEA in April that Nebraska's DEA registration did not allow it to import controlled substances.

    "The attempts by the state to obtain an execution warrant AFTER April 12 ... was basically a ‘sham' execution prohibited by the Eighth Amendment," Soucie said in Thursday's filing.

    In a letter faxed Monday to Douglas County District Judge Thomas Otepka and the Douglas County attorney's office, a copy of which was obtained by the Journal Star, Soucie said documents he requested for Moore's case indicate that on May 26, the DCS "did receive a letter of admonition from the DEA and that DCS agreed that their current supply of thiopental ... had been turned over to the Nebraska State Patrol to be destroyed."

    But Dave Cookson, chief deputy attorney general, said Wednesday his office contacted officials in the U.S. Department of Justice after the admonition letter and both sides agreed the state would apply for the proper import license and seek a new supply of the drug.

    He also said the state could have had a supply of the needed drug by June 14.

    Corrections Department spokeswoman Dawn Renee Smith said the supply has not been destroyed yet.

    Soucie also is challenging Nebraska's lethal injection law, passed in 2009 after the state's high court ruled death in the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

    He said lawmakers unconstitutionally allowed the Corrections Department to set a lethal injection protocol and exceeded their authority by passing a law that changed Moore's sentence from death by electrocution to lethal injection.

    Moore, 53, has been on death row since 1980, sentenced to die for killing Omaha cab drivers Maynard D. Helgeland and Reuel Eugene Van Ness during botched robberies in 1979.

    The state has not executed an inmate since Robert Williams died in the electric chair in 1997.

    http://journalstar.com/news/local/cr...#ixzz1QrWUt2XC

  9. #19
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    Judge allows inmate's attorney to amend execution challenge

    A judge on Wednesday cleared the way for the lawyer for Nebraska death-row inmate Carey Dean Moore to ask that his client's death sentence be vacated because state officials withheld information about problems with the lethal injection drug they bought from India.

    Douglas County District Judge Thomas Otepka gave attorney Jerry Soucie of the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy until Aug. 15 to amend a motion he originally had filed challenging the purchase of the drug.

    That original filing is now partially moot because the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in April that the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services did not have a license to import the drug and could not use it to execute Moore.

    But state Attorney General Jon Bruning's office continued to push for an execution date for Moore even though it knew -- but did not publicize -- that it could not use the drug that the Department of Correctional Services bought late last year from Kayem Pharmaceutical Pvt. Ltd. of India, Soucie said.

    Soucie contended that the actions of Bruning's office might serve as "a new and independent grounds to challenge Moore's death sentences under the Eighth and/or Fourteenth Amendments."

    Moore had been scheduled to be executed June 14, but the state Supreme Court issued a stay while Soucie challenged the drug purchase by the state.

    It appears that Moore was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment by being allowed to believe he might die on June 14, Soucie said. He also said Moore might have been denied his right of due process.

    But Dave Cookson, chief deputy attorney general, said earlier that his office contacted officials in the U.S. Department of Justice after the admonition letter and both sides agreed the state would apply for the proper import license and seek a new supply of the drug.

    He also said the state could have had a supply of the needed drug by June 14.

    Sodium thiopental -- one of three drugs in Nebraska's lethal-injection protocol -- has been in short supply since last year, when the only U.S. manufacturer, Hospira Inc., said it was ending production because of death-penalty opposition overseas.

    "The facts regarding the DCS purchase of thiopental from Kayem and the subsequent actions involving DEA are solely within the control of the Nebraska Attorney General's Office and DCS," Soucie said in a court filing Wednesday. "The more the state representatives withhold information in the hope that the Nebraska courts will decide the constitutional issues on incomplete and inaccurate information, the more Moore will take all necessary efforts in obtaining discovery.

    "I am fully willing to litigate the current postconviction motion based on a complete and accurate understanding of the facts," he said.

    Corrections officials since have obtained an import license but have not purchased a new supply of the drug.

    Corrections Department spokeswoman Dawn Renee Smith said Wednesday the supply from India has not yet been destroyed and that the department still is trying to find a new supply.

    Aside from the now-moot challenge to the India drug purchase, other parts of Soucie's original challenge are still alive. He is challenging Nebraska's lethal injection law, passed in 2009 after the state's high court ruled death in the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

    He said lawmakers unconstitutionally allowed the Corrections Department to set a lethal injection protocol and exceeded their authority by passing a law that changed Moore's sentence from death by electrocution to lethal injection.

    Moore, 53, has been on death row since 1980, sentenced to die for killing Omaha cab drivers Maynard D. Helgeland and Reuel Eugene Van Ness during botched robberies in 1979.

    The state has not executed an inmate since Robert Williams died in the electric chair in 1997.

    http://journalstar.com/news/state-an...#ixzz1S4LeA212

  10. #20
    Senior Member Frequent Poster stixfix69's Avatar
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    Easy fix here....Make a call to Huntsville and borrow some....Seriously though, they might as well commute his sentence to LWOP, i mean the man has been on DR for 31 years......The true crime is allowing this to go on for so long, and the victims families having to sit and watch this guy continue to avoid being put to death.....If it takes a jury 2 weeks or even up to 6 months to find a DR inmate guilty and sentence him to death, then there is noway it should take 30 years to execute the sentence......We have a very flawed DP process......
    Last edited by stixfix69; 07-14-2011 at 12:45 PM.

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