Nebraska lawmakers abolish death penalty

Nebraska became the 19th American state to outlaw the death penalty and the first traditionally controlled by conservatives to repeal capital punishment in the United States in more than four decades.

After more than two hours of emotional debate on Wednesday, legislators in the midwestern state voted over the objections of the Republican governor Pete Ricketts, a supporter of the death penalty, by a 30 to 19 margin, securing enough ballots to override his veto.

The vote drew applause from death-penalty opponents watching the vote in the public gallery in Nebraska’s Capitol building in Lincoln.

"I have been pushing for this for 40 years but all of this time it's never been done," said Ernie Chambers, an independent Nebraska senator who has introduced repeal legislation 38 times.

Legal trend

The state joins 18 others and the District of Columbia in banning the death penalty. A recent trend across the US has seen states either outlaw the ultimate punishment or put it on hold.

Six states, mostly centrist or liberal-leaning, have voted to repeal the death penalty since 2007 – Maryland, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New York and New Jersey – but no traditionally conservative state has abolished it since North Dakota in 1973.

Mr Ricketts condemned the legislature for the vote.

“My words cannot express how appalled I am that we have lost a critical tool to protect law enforcement and Nebraska families,” he said.

The state last executed an inmate in 1997 and the death penalty has been in question in the past year since the bungled executions of prisoners in Oklahoma and other states, and the expiration of Nebraska's supply of sodium thiopental, a lethal injection drug, in 2013.

Botched killings

The use of new experimental-drug cocktails resulting in botched killings has put executions on hold in some states and strengthened the argument for death penalty repeals. Nebraska legislators last voted to abolish the death penalty in 1979 but failed to secure enough votes to veto the governor.

State senators supported the repeal on the basis that the state had failed to administer the punishment. Some were swayed by the arguments of Catholic leaders opposed to capital punishment.

The state's abolition of the death penalty means 10 men on death row are in effect serving life. They include John Lotter (43), who was convicted of murdering transgender victim Brandon Teena in 1993, a crime that inspired the Oscar-winning film Boys Don't Cry.

There have been 1,408 executions in the US since 1976, when the supreme court approved the death penalty after a short moratorium. Texas accounted for more than a third of killings, with 525, including seven this year, the highest number of any state in 2015.