Last month, Maryland became the sixth state in the last six years and the 18th overall to abolish the death penalty. Will Nebraska follow as number 19?
The opportunity exists, with a bill on General File. Moreover, the possibility appears to be more realistic than perhaps at any time during the last three decades. The policy flaws involving cost, ineffectiveness, risk of error, and disparate application have never been more apparent. Morally, revenge is still an inappropriate policy justification.
The scenario could be played out at the State Capitol during the next few weeks.
Might the ending be a showdown between longtime senator Ernie Chambers and Governor Heineman on a veto override? That’s one of the scripts. Another is that the bill moves a step or two in the process and then carriers over to 2014. There are more.
Legislative Bill 543 proposes to repeal the death-penalty and replace it as punishment for aggravated first-degree murder with imprisonment for life without parole, subject only to the authority in the Nebraska Constitution for the State Board of Pardons—Attorney General, Secretary of State and Governor—to commute any life sentence to a term of years, from which parole might only then become a possibility.
LB 543 is a priority bill for the 35 working days left in the current session of the Unicameral, having been designated as such by Sen. Chambers. It awaits a first round of floor debate, having been advanced to the full Legislature by the Judiciary Committee on a 7-0 vote, with one abstention: Sen. Mark Christensen of Imperial. Those who voted to advance were Senators Brad Ashford and Steve Lathrop from Omaha, Colby Coash and Amanda McGill from Lincoln, Les Seiler from Hastings and Al Davis from Hyannis.
In 1979, Sen. Chambers steered a death-penalty repeal bill through three rounds of floor debate and on to final passage by a one-vote margin. Then-Governor Charles Thone vetoed the bill and there was no override.
In 2013, LB 543 represents probably the most legitimate possibility for abolishing the death penalty since that vetoed effort of 33 years ago. Controversy and concern over authority for the state to kill as punishment have continued to build. The authority has hung on despite the weight of flaws and inadequacies, as well as moral challenges.
Even though the death penalty has been rendered as the sentence more than 30 times in Nebraska since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976 as a permissible, restricted-use punishment, only three executions have been carried out, the last in 1997. Since that last execution, the Nebraska Supreme Court has struck down electrocution as the sole method, the Legislature has replaced electrocution with lethal injection and the state has been embroiled in an embarrassing, national and international mess stemming from questionable efforts to acquire a drug required by the execution protocols.
Meanwhile, during all this time, costs of having the death penalty have continued to mount; that is, taxpayer-funded expenditures that, without a death penalty, could have been used for solving cold cases or improving reparations for victims of violent crimes or making other improvements in the criminal justice system.
There also has been growing evidence of the painful human and emotional costs for families of victims caused by delays and public attention rekindled over and over.
On a different plane, there are costs of compensation for those eventually determined to be innocent of the murders for which they were convicted. Their stories (e.g., the "Beatrice six," Darrel Parker) underscore the sobering possibility that an innocent person could be executed.
Some of the flaws and concerns might be thought to be offset by the notion that just having the death penalty serves as a deterrent, but that notion continues to unravel under the weight of evidence to the contrary.
The Nebraska Catholic Conference, representing the mutual interests and concerns of the three Diocesan Bishops, supports LB 543 and hopes it becomes law, not only for reasons of the death penalty’s policy problems, but also for reasons of morality, stemming from Catholic Social teaching. Testimony on behalf of the NCC was presented to the Judiciary Committee at the public hearing on LB 543. That testimony is available on the NCC website: www.nebcathcon.org.
On to another result in the Legislature: A salute please, for the six members of the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee—there was one abstention—who voted to indefinitely postpone LB 518. The bill proposed to repeal last year’s LB 599, a veto survivor, which reinstated medical-assistance coverage for prenatal care for the unborn children of impoverished, but otherwise ineligible, pregnant women, using the unborn child option of the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program. Voting for the IPP motion were Senators Kathy Campbell, Bob Krist, Mike Gloor, Tanya Cook, Sue Crawford and Sara Howard.
And finally…. Kudos to Nebraska’s First District U.S. Representative, Jeff Fortenberry on being selected by the House Speaker to be a member of Congress’s delegation for the installation of Pope Francis. A well-deserved honor.
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