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Thread: Nebraska Capital Punishment News

  1. #171
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    April 24, 2017

    Bill for lethal injection confidentiality raises arguments

    LINCOLN -- A bill to allow individuals or companies involved in the distribution or manufacture of lethal injection drugs to be confidential continued for hours of debate Thursday.

    LB661, introduced by Sen. John Kuehn of Heartwell, is also known as a “shield law” to protect anyone involved in the manufacturing of lethal injection drugs from threats or persecution.

    “Keeping the identity of manufacturers confidential to ensure access of these drugs, to prevent further drugs from being removed from the market, to ensure safe medication to all citizens, is the greater good,” Kuehn said.

    Other states with similar shield laws include Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, Georgia and Ohio. Many others, such as Oklahoma and South Carolina, have also tried to implement this type of shield law.

    According to the bill’s proponents, states with the death penalty have difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs from domestic suppliers. Suppliers don’t want the bad publicity of being associated with manufacturing and distributing these drugs. This results in states having to shop around other countries for the drugs.

    Nebraska is known for buying a lethal injection drug in 2015 called sodium thiopental, from Harris Pharma, a distributor in India. The Food and Drug Administration said Nebraska could not legally import the drug and the shipment never made it to the state.

    Opponents of the bill said that confidentiality would inhibit accountability for companies who make the drugs. Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha was particularly against full anonymity for such companies.

    Chambers is a well-known opponent of the death penalty in general and mostly used his time to speak against the death penalty. However, he also spoke against hiding the identity of lethal injection drug manufacturers.

    “We all know good and well why it’s important to know the source of something,” Chambers said. “If these bad drugs continue to show up, you need to trace it back and find the compounding pharmacy that’s responsible.”

    Chambers was referring to the possibility of problems arising with a drug. If the drug is proven cruel or ineffective, people would need to know where it came from to hold that person or company responsible.

    Nebraska voters decided last year to reinstate the death penalty after a repeal of it the year before. Legislators in support of LB661, like Sen. Mike Groene of North Platte, said the proposed shield legislation would let capital punishment work for the Nebraskans who voted it back in.

    “I believe in justice,” Groene said. “I believe in punishing evil that exists in this world.”

    Groene said anonymity would allow the state to be able to obtain, and if necessary, use the death penalty drugs again.

    Nebraska has not used capital punishment since 1997.

    There was no vote or action taken on the bill.

    http://www.dailynebraskan.com/news/b...caae70583.html
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    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  2. #172
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    Pending challenges of Nebraska's death penalty system could affect state's latest execution efforts

    By Joe Duggan
    The Omaha World-Herald

    LINCOLN — A legal issue looms over Nebraska’s death penalty that’s unrelated to the new and untried lethal drug combination state officials unveiled this week.

    Defense attorneys say pending challenges of a system that allows judges rather than juries to impose death sentences could impact whether the state ends its streak of 20 years without an execution.

    At least three of the 11 men on death row have challenged the state’s procedure, which gives three-judge panels the final say in capital cases. They argue that the U.S. Constitution requires the same jury that decides a defendant’s guilt to also decide his fate.

    Their argument has so far proved unsuccessful. A district court judge recently issued an opinion that utterly rejected any argument of constitutional flaws in Nebraska’s system. Attorneys for the inmates will now hope for favorable rulings in state and federal appellate courts.

    Nebraska prison officials announced Thursday they have obtained supplies of four drugs they say will allow them to carry out a lethal injection execution. Attorney General Doug Peterson said that after a 60-day notice period, he intends to seek a death warrant for Jose Sandoval, who led three gunmen who stormed a Norfolk bank in 2002 and shot down four bank employees and a customer.

    While attention immediately focused on the drugs, which have never been used in combination by another death penalty state, questions about Nebraska’s capital sentencing procedure remain unsettled.

    The three death-row inmates who have challenged Nebraska’s system are John Lotter, Marco Torres and Jeffrey Hessler.

    They rely on a 2016 case called Hurst v. Florida, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a capital sentencing scheme that allowed judges to impose death sentences. The ruling in the Florida case prompted the Delaware Supreme Court to end the death penalty there because it relied on a similar system.

    Although Sandoval has not yet raised a similar challenge, the issue could potentially affect the state’s efforts to execute him, said Rebecca Woodman, a defense lawyer in Lenexa, Kansas, who represents Lotter.

    “Those cases could have an impact on Sandoval’s case for sure,” she said.

    But a Nebraska judge recently delivered a blow to Lotter’s effort to overturn the death penalty based on the Hurst decision. Saline County District Judge Vicky Johnson, who presided over Lotter’s motion in Richardson County, said Nebraska’s system is substantially different from the one struck down by the Supreme Court.

    In Florida, juries provided judges with advisory opinions about sentencing. The key factual determinations regarding punishment were left with the judge.

    In Nebraska, juries must decide — during a second penalty phase held right after the trial — whether aggravating factors against a convicted defendant exist. If juries find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that aggravating factors do exist, a three-judge panel considers any mitigating factors in favor of the defendant.

    If the aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors, the judicial panel may then impose a death sentence.

    “This makes Nebraska’s sentencing process completely dissimilar from the sentencing scheme utilized in Hurst,” Johnson wrote in an order issued in late September.

    The judge went even further in support of Nebraska’s system. She said the Hurst decision may apply to death penalty cases still under direct appeal but not retroactively to convictions like Lotter’s and Sandoval’s, which were long ago affirmed by the Nebraska Supreme Court.

    Lotter also failed in an earlier attempt to raise the issue before a federal district court judge.

    Woodman declined to comment about the most recent ruling against her client. But Lotter has appealed to the Nebraska Supreme Court, which recently agreed to hear the case.

    Lotter, 46, has spent 22 years on death row for the 1993 triple homicide at a farmhouse near Humboldt, Nebraska. The case inspired the award-winning movie “Boys Don’t Cry.”

    Torres, 42, was sent to death row for the 2007 execution-style shootings of two Grand Island men. His challenge of Nebraska’s system is part of a habeas corpus motion filed last summer in U.S. District Court in Omaha.

    Hessler, 39, was sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Gering girl in 2003. A check of court records showed no recent activity on his motion challenging the state’s sentencing scheme.

    http://www.omaha.com/news/crime/pend...637c113ec.html

  3. #173
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    Nebraska sued for refusing to name execution drugs suppliers

    OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Nebraska's prison system Friday, accusing it of violating state public records laws by refusing to identify its suppliers of lethal injection drugs.

    The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services denied a Nov. 10 public records request by The Associated Press, and the Omaha World-Herald reported Tuesday that its request also was denied.

    The department argues that the records are protected by attorney-client privilege and that the supplier is part of its "execution team," whose identities are confidential.

    The ACLU disputes both arguments and is seeking the information's release and attorney fees.

    "This lawsuit lays out Nebraska's shady history of backroom deals and attempts to circumvent federal law to obtain lethal injection drugs," ACLU of Nebraska Executive Director Danielle Conrad said in a written statement.

    The department notified inmate Jose Sandoval on Nov. 9 that it intends to execute him using four drugs. An execution date hasn't been scheduled. Sandoval, 38, was one of three men sentenced to death on five counts of first-degree murder for the September 2002 deaths of five people in a botched bank robbery in Norfolk, a city of 24,000 about 110 miles northwest of Omaha.

    With the notification to Sandoval, the department announced it intends to use the sedative diazepam, commonly known as Valium; the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl citrate; the paralytic cisatracurium; and potassium chloride to induce death. A department spokeswoman, Dawn-Renee Smith, said then that the system had access to all four drugs and that all were purchased in the U.S., but she declined to say how the drugs were obtained or who provided them.

    Smith declined to comment on the lawsuit Friday, saying the department doesn't publicly discuss pending litigation.

    Nebraska's death penalty has been roiled by controversy in recent years. In 2013, the state's batch of sodium thiopental — then required for Nebraska lethal injections — expired. State officials failed several times to replace the drug, including in early 2015 when it paid $54,000 for the drug to a dealer based in India but never received it because the federal government blocked the shipment over questions about the drug's legality.

    The Legislature abolished the state's death penalty in May 2015 over Gov. Pete Ricketts' veto, but capital punishment was reinstated last year by Nebraska voters in a referendum funded, in part, by $300,000 of Ricketts' own money.

    Nebraska hasn't executed an inmate since 1997, when it used the electric chair, and has never carried one out with lethal injection drugs.

    "We understand that Nebraskans of goodwill do hold differing opinions about the death penalty, but we shouldn't allow the Department of Corrections to disregard the law and the Nebraska tradition of open government for pure political reasons," Conrad said.

    http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/crim...n-12397961.php
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  4. #174
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    Judge dismisses ACLU lawsuit filed over referendum on behalf of Nebraska death-row inmates

    By Lori Pilger
    The Lincoln Journal-Star

    A Lancaster County judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of death-row inmates challenging the referendum that reinstated the death penalty in Nebraska.

    In a 14-page decision Monday, District Judge John Colborn agreed with attorneys for the state who argued that there was an equally serviceable remedy available to those inmates on one of their three claims: post-conviction motions in their criminal cases.

    But two other claims failed outright, he found.

    The ACLU had filed the lawsuit in December, asking the court to block the state from carrying out executions for those who were on death row when lawmakers repealed Nebraska's death penalty in 2015.

    They argued three points: the referendum was invalid because supporters failed to file a sworn statement; because Gov. Pete Ricketts and Treasurer Don Stenberg simultaneously had exercised executive and legislative powers; and that, even if it was valid, LB268 irrevocably converted those inmates' death sentences to life sentences.

    In his order, Colborn rejected the ACLU's separation-of-powers argument, finding that the interpretation would make a wide range of activity constitutionally suspect, "like members of the executive and legislative branch endorsing one another for office, campaigning for one another, or donating to one another's campaign."

    "The plaintiffs have not identified any cases that support their sweeping reading of this language," he wrote.

    So, too, did he reject the ACLU's contention that the repeal converted their sentences to life terms.

    He concluded that the referendum petition suspended the legislative act when the petition was filed with the Secretary of State on Aug. 26, 2015, four days before LB268 took effect.

    Colborn said the Legislature didn't have the power to change existing death sentences by passing the law. By law, only the Board of Pardons can commute sentences, he said.

    Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson applauded this week's decision, calling the opinion a thorough analysis of important case law supporting the dismissal.

    He said the ACLU had asked the court to "override the will of the people expressed in the referendum." But those who have committed brutal murders were legally sentenced to death, and the Nebraska Supreme Court has upheld their sentences.

    "This office is committed to our legal duty to enforce the death sentences ordered by Nebraska’s Courts," Peterson said.

    The Department of Correctional Services already has notified two of the men — Jose Sandoval and Carey Dean Moore — of the lethal-injection drugs that would be used to carry out their sentences, a necessary precursor to asking for a death warrant.

    ACLU attorneys had alleged the ballot initiative violated the state Constitution's separation of powers and should be invalidated because Ricketts was a driving force behind it.

    They also argued that state lawmakers effectively commuted the sentences by repealing the death penalty and that Ricketts violated the separation of powers act when he used the referendum power reserved for the people of the state to reinstate it.

    http://journalstar.com/news/state-an...60aad7597.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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  5. #175
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    It sure is funny how they wait over a year after the initiative passed to file this claim. I'm sure it has nothing to do with NE taking steps to resume executions.

    It'll be a while before they resume, but this is a step in the right direction. NE is probably going to face a full on assault like AR did last year.

    Lastly, a loss for the ACLU is often a win for good in this country. The victims of these DR inmates had their civil liberties grossly violated. The ACLU sure has interesting priorities.
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  6. #176
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    AG's office argues judge should dismiss latest lawsuit challenging death penalty

    A Lincoln judge will decide if the latest death-penalty challenge - this one over how the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services established its execution protocol - should move forward or be dismissed.

    The Nebraska Attorney General's office argued that Rev. Stephen Griffith and Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, 2 vocal death-penalty opponents who filed the case, lack standing because they aren't on death row.

    "We believe the standing issue is very straightforward," Assistant Attorney General Ryan Post said Wednesday. "In order to challenge the validity of a rule or regulation, it has to apply to you."

    The execution protocol does not apply to Griffith and Chambers, he said, in asking Lancaster County District Judge Lori Maret to dismiss the lawsuit.

    But David Litterine-Kaufman, a New York attorney who represents Griffith and Chambers along with the ACLU, said the argument that only prisoners on death row have standing to challenge procedural violations in adopting the execution protocol "makes little sense."

    The Nebraska Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires that the materials be made publicly available in the Nebraska Secretary of State's office when it gives notice of the proposed execution protocol before adopting it.

    "It goes without saying that death row prisoners cannot visit the office of the Secretary of State to review those materials. Nor can death row prisoners attend the public hearing," he argued.

    Litterine-Kaufman said the state's interpretation would mean that nobody has standing to challenge APA violations in the adoption of the execution protocol.

    "That cannot be the law," he said.

    While the Legislature gave the department the authority to develop the protocol for carrying out death sentences, Griffith and Chambers say it exceeded its statutory authority by not following the hearing provisions set out for state agencies.

    Litterine-Kaufman also took issue with the fact that Corrections didn't make any draft or working copies of the execution protocol available before the Dec. 30, 2016, hearing.

    "Candidly, plaintiffs think that defendant's representations are highly implausible. It strains credulity to suggest that NDCS did not consult with any experts or spend any time developing a protocol for a matter as serious and as complex as the taking of a human life by lethal injection," he said. advertisement

    If it didn't, Litterine-Kaufman said, then the state's process was unreasonable and arbitrary.

    Maret said she would rule on the motion later.

    Outside the courtroom, Amy Miller of ACLU Nebraska said she feels confident that the statute is clear and that the state didn't follow it in this case.

    Even if the lawsuit survives this hurdle and ultimately is successful, it only would mean a delay to the state carrying out the death penalty. Corrections simply would have to restart the process of developing an execution protocol.

    It is one of several lawsuits involving the death penalty. Friday, Prisons Director Scott Frakes cited pending litigation as the reason he wouldn't be attending a May 8 hearing of the Legislature's Judiciary Committee to answer questions concerning the state's procedures for crafting its lethal injection protocol.

    Committee chairwoman Laura Ebke said Wednesday a subpoena was ready to be delivered seeking to compel him to attend.

    (source: Hastings Tribune)
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  7. #177
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    DEA says Nebraska’s purchase of lethal injection drugs was legal

    By Joe Duggan
    The Omaha World-Herald

    LINCOLN — A federal review of records related to Nebraska’s purchase of lethal injection drugs found “nothing in violation of the law,” an official with the Drug Enforcement Administration said late last week.

    A DEA investigator made a March 19 on-site visit to the Nebraska State Penitentiary, which houses the execution chamber and stores lethal injection drugs. The review of records and drug inventories at the prison took place days after the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska called for an investigation into how state officials obtained the lethal drugs.

    “Plain and simple, they’re in compliance with Drug Enforcement Administration regulations,” DEA Special Agent Matthew Barden of Omaha said in a phone interview late Friday afternoon.

    In a March 12 letter to the DEA, the ACLU questioned whether prison officials had duped authorities into issuing a federal import permit by saying it was intended for a prison pharmacy located four miles away from the state pen. The ACLU also questioned whether Nebraska officials used a DEA permit issued to the prison clinic to purchase drugs from distributors who assumed they would be used for medical purposes.

    “We did diligent research and presented important questions about these critical issues to the DEA. It is reassuring to know that the DEA took these allegations seriously and opened an investigation,” said Danielle Conrad, executive director of the ACLU of Nebraska.

    Questions about how the drugs were obtained stem from the refusal of state authorities to reveal information about the supplier. Such suppliers have been increasingly difficult for death penalty states to come by.

    Major pharmaceutical manufacturers have policies prohibiting the sale of their drugs for executions. Pfizer sent a letter to Nebraska officials last year saying three of the four drugs the state intends to use in a lethal injection are on the company’s restricted list and should be returned.

    Officials with the Corrections Department and the office of Gov. Pete Ricketts have refused to say whether the state had obtained Pfizer drugs. The officials also have declined to release records identifying the drug supplier, which has prompted independent public records lawsuits filed by The World-Herald, the Lincoln Journal Star and the ACLU. Those lawsuits are set for a trial Monday in Lancaster County District Court.

    Marie Coulter, a diversion investigator for the DEA in Omaha, sent an email to prison officials four days after the ACLU letter saying she was going to conduct an on-site review. The World-Herald obtained the email, along with several others related to it, through a public records request.

    The emails did not include details of the investigator’s findings. Barden said the review was thorough and found nothing to indicate the drugs were obtained in violation of regulations or federal law.

    “We did our due diligence,” he said. “We went immediately to the source. There was nothing that was uncovered that looked anything out of the ordinary.”

    Nebraska officials have run into difficulties in obtaining lethal drugs in the past. In 2011, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered the return of an imported sedative because of questions about its origin. In 2015, then-U.S. Attorney Deb Gilg said Nebraska officials were trying to import the same drug from India in violation of federal law.

    Prison officials have said the latest round of drugs it has purchased for execution were obtained domestically.

    Legal wrangling over the drugs has intensified since late last year when the state notified death row inmate Jose Sandoval it had the substances needed to execute him. Attorney General Doug Peterson has since asked the Nebraska Supreme Court to set an execution date for Carey Dean Moore, sentenced to die for the 1979 slayings of Omaha cabdrivers Reuel Van Ness and Maynard Helgeland.

    http://www.omaha.com/news/courts/dea...22b90a950.html
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  8. #178
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    In blow to death penalty opponents, judge tosses suit challenging Nebraska's lethal injection protocol

    By Joe Duggan
    Omaha World-Herald

    LINCOLN — A Nebraska judge has dealt another defeat to death penalty opponents by dismissing a lawsuit that challenged the state's lethal injection protocol.

    Lancaster County District Judge Lori Maret ruled the two death penalty opponents who filed the lawsuit lacked standing to do so. She did not decide in Friday's ruling whether prison officials followed required procedures when they set up a new lethal injection protocol in 2017.

    The lawsuit was filed
    by Stephen Griffith of Lincoln and State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who alleged the state violated requirements under the Administrative Procedures Act when adopting a new lethal injection protocol.

    The office of Attorney General Doug Peterson prevailed in getting the lawsuit tossed out, arguing that only death row inmates have the standing to raise such claims. Spokeswoman Suzanne Gage said the courts have determined that Chambers can't challenge laws that don't apply to him.

    "His desire to obstruct the death penalty does not change that," she added.

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska provided lawyers to argue the case. Danielle Conrad, the group's Nebraska director, said a judge should determine whether Nebraska authorities complied with the law in adopting the new execution procedure.

    "We are disappointed in today's decision dismissing this important case on procedural grounds," she said. "We will confer with our clients to determine how to proceed and will actively explore all options, including an appeal."

    It marks the second time in recent months a court has dismissed an ACLU-backed lawsuit that sought to block Nebraska's efforts to resume executions after 21 years. The ACLU is appealing the earlier dismissal of allegations that Gov. Pete Ricketts violated the Constitution by helping lead and fund a voter referendum that overturned the Legislature's 2015 repeal of capital punishment.

    In the meantime, the attorney general has asked the Nebraska Supreme Court to hasten a decision issuing a death warrant for Carey Dean Moore, the state's longest serving death-row inmate. The attorney general has suggested the court set a July 10 execution date so it can be carried out before one of the state's lethal injection drugs expires.

    The lawsuit that prompted the most recent decision argued the lethal injection procedure should be voided because state officials failed the follow the technical provisions of the law.

    Griffith, a retired minister, said shortly before a public hearing on proposed changes to the execution protocol, he requested related public documents from the Department of Correctional Services. He was given a draft of the proposal, but not a fiscal impact statement or working copies of revisions.

    Griffith and Chambers argued that without the additional records, their public testimony was not fully informed. They also said the lack of documentation supporting the procedure makes the protocol unreasonable and arbitrary, in violation of the due process clause of the Nebraska Constitution.

    The judge said a plaintiff must show possible harm to his or her legal rights and privileges to successfully challenge a regulation. Griffith and Chambers could not do so, and therefore, they lacked standing, she decided.

    Griffith and Chambers also argued they should be granted an exception to the standing rule, which allows citizens to raise challenges of “great public concern.”

    “The process for executing persons and the rulemaking record for that process are important policy matters, but they are not matters of great public concern,” the judge wrote in her order.

    She pointed previous standing rulings in lawsuits over public wildlife lands and the proliferation of gambling, which the courts also have said don’t rise to the level of great public concern.

    http://www.omaha.com/news/courts/in-...c7d59b25a.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  9. #179
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    Two factors vital as Nebraska seeks to carry out 1st execution in decades (AUDIO)

    BY BRENT MARTIN
    Nebraska Radio Network

    Two factors could pave the way for Nebraska to carry out its first execution since 1997.

    University of Nebraska law professor Eric Berger says the fact that the state is pushing for an execution date and Carey Dean Moore isn’t fighting it makes it more likely there will be an execution this year.

    “But, that said, I think the sort of uniqueness and bizarreness of the protocol that Nebraska chose certainly casts an additional cloud over their effort to do the procedure,” Berger tells Nebraska Radio Network.

    Berger refers to the four-drug protocol proposed by the state, but never used before.

    Nebraska proposes using Diazepam, a sedative, followed by the opioid Fentanyl Citrate. Cisatracurium Besylate would be used to paralyze the inmate with Potassium Chloride to stop the heart, causing death.

    Legal challenges in other states have proven successful to block executions there.

    Still, Berger says those two factors remain the overriding reason Nebraska might execute its first inmate since 1997.

    “When you have those two things: an inmate who doesn’t have any legal challenges and doesn’t want to bring any more, and a state that wants to execute someone and that appears to have the drugs, I would say it’s probably more likely than not,” Berger says.

    Some legal challenges to Nebraska’s efforts remain pending.

    One lawsuit challenges the governor’s involvement in the petition drive which landed the death penalty on the ballot, contending he violated the separation of powers. Voters overturned the legislature’s decision to repeal the death penalty and reinstated it. That lawsuit also argues the inmates on death row had their sentences commuted to life in prison. The lawsuit didn’t persuade a lower court and is now before the Nebraska Supreme Court.

    A lawsuit has been filed, asking that source of the drugs proposed to be used in the Nebraska lethal injection protocol be made public.

    Another lawsuit challenges the state rulemaking procedure used to establish the lethal injection protocol. It also has lost on the trial court level, but that decision likely will be appealed.

    Moore, who is 60, was sentenced to death for killing two Omaha taxi drivers in 1979: Reuel Van Ness and Maynard Helgeland. Moore has been on death row longer than any other of the state’s 12 condemned inmates.

    https://nebraskaradionetwork.com/201...decades-audio/
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  10. #180
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    Records identifying Nebraska's lethal injection drug supplier must be released, judge rules

    By Joe Duggan
    Omaha World-Herald

    LINCOLN — Documents revealing the identity of Nebraska's lethal injection drug supplier are public and must be released, a judge said Monday in a ruling that delivered a partial victory for government transparency.

    The judge sided with lawyers for the state's two largest newspapers by ordering the public disclosure of records related to the source of four death penalty drugs. But Lancaster County District Judge Jodi Nelson said officials may withhold documents that directly identify members of the execution team to comply with a confidentiality requirement in state law.

    Nelson told state officials they have seven days to release the records deemed public. In a statement, Attorney General Doug Peterson said his office will appeal that portion of the ruling, which could further delay release of the documents.

    The Omaha World-Herald, the Lincoln Journal Star and the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska filed the public records lawsuit after a prison official refused to release the records. The judge's ruling applies to all of the plaintiffs, which argued that withholding the documents violated the Nebraska Public Records Act.

    The judge said records that must be released by the Department of Correctional Services are communications with the drug supplier, Drug Enforcement Administration records, invoices, inventory logs and photographs of drug packaging.

    Assistant Attorney General Ryan Post argued at a trial in the case that all of the records should remain confidential because they could lead to the identification of an execution team member. The judge rejected the argument.

    "The evidence is speculative at best that disclosure of these documents would be reasonably calculated to lead to such identification," she wrote in her order.

    Reporters representing the newspapers at the May 14 trial testified that prison officials had released similar execution drug records in the past. In 2015, such disclosure led to the discovery that Nebraska officials lost $54,400 in state funds by trying to purchase foreign drugs that the state could not legally import.

    "The court's decision today ensures transparency and accountability as the state seeks to carry out its most grave function," said Danielle Conrad, director of the ACLU of Nebraska.

    Nebraska officials have chosen not to shield the identity of lethal injection drug suppliers. Corrections officials did not include such protection when adopting their latest execution protocol. Nebraska lawmakers debated but did not pass a bill that proposed to offer such protection.

    In November, prison officials announced that they had obtained supplies of four substances they intended to use to execute death row inmate Jose Sandoval. In January, they gave the same notice to death row inmate Carey Dean Moore.

    The attorney general has since filed a motion to set an execution date for Moore, but the State Supreme Court has not ruled on the motion.

    Obtaining lethal injection drugs has become increasingly difficult because drug manufacturers don't want their products used in execution chambers. Many manufacturers also impose requirements on their distributors not to provide their drugs for use in executions.

    Pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer sent a letter to Nebraska officials last year saying three of the four drugs the state intends to use for lethal injection are on the company's restricted list and should be returned.

    Officials with the Corrections Department and the office of Gov. Pete Ricketts have refused to say if the state had obtained Pfizer drugs. But officials have not returned the drugs.

    http://www.omaha.com/news/courts/rec...98323f08d.html
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

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