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.
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