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Editorial
Veto vote measure of Legislature's trust in administration
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
By the time many of you read this, the question will be answered: Did the Nebraska legislature override Gov. Pete Ricketts' veto of LB 268 to repeal the death penalty?
The bill passed with only 32 votes, two more than the 30 required to enact the law over Ricketts' veto.
Two recent events might have had a disproportionate effect on the outcome.
One was the killing of a popular Omaha police officer who was also the new mother of a premature baby about to be released from the hospital.
A second was the death from natural causes, of Michael Ryan, who has been on death row for three decades after sadistic cult killings.
Even those opposed to the death penalty would have difficulty finding justification for allowing Ryan to live, and if OPD officer Kerrie Orozco's killer had not been killed by police, the same might be said for him.
Whether that would be enough to persuade three senators to change their votes was the question.
Ricketts, law enforcement officials and family members of a bank employee killed in a Norfolk robbery urged lawmakers Tuesday to uphold the governor's veto.
LB 268 does nothing to repeal current death sentences, according to the Nebraska attorney general, and the state recently paid more than $50,000 for lethal injection drugs from India which should arrive this summer.
All the usual arguments have come up during the current attempt to repeal Nebraska's death penalty:
* Is it moral for the state to take a life because someone else took a life?
* Is it constitutional? i.e. cruel and unusual punishment? The electric chair was declared as such in 1997, forcing Nebraska to resort to lethal injection, which is becoming more and more difficult to administer because of supply problems and botched executions.
* Does it actually reduce crime?
* Does society have a right to exact retribution on killers and other criminals by killing them?
* What if someone is falsely convicted? More than 150 people have been freed from death row since the modern death penalty was revived in 1973.
* Does it cost more or less to send someone to prison for life without parole?
* Is it applied fairly to minorities and poor people?
* Do all defendants in capital crimes get adequate legal representation?
* Can a physician morally oversee an execution?
And there are many other arguments for most capital punishment debates.
The tipping point for Nebraska's repeal attempt, however, probably was something more practical: competence.
The Nebraska Department of Corrections has yet to recover from a sentencing scandal that saw a major shakeup in the agency after officials were found to be responding to overcrowding by releasing prisoners early in defiance of court decisions. That included one Nikko Jenkins, who went on a killing spree after his release.
At trial, he claimed he killed under direct orders of Apophis, an Egyptian evil snake-god who tried to devour the sun every night.
Before the sentencing scandal, law enforcement's image took a hit when Douglas County's top crime scene investigator went to jail for planting evidence.
The governor and attorney general asked lawmakers to trust them to clean up problems with Nebraska's criminal justice system.
Today's vote by the Legislature was a referendum on that trust.