By Josh Funk
Associated Press
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska Supreme Court last week set the date for what would be the state’s first execution in more than 13 years and its first ever lethal injection, after the court banned electrocution in 2008.
Carey Dean Moore, 53, has been sentenced to death for the 1979 slayings of two Omaha cabbies. He was convicted of first-degree murder for killing Maynard D. Helgeland and Reuel Eugene Van Ness during botched robberies.
Moore’s lawyer, Jerry Soucie, said Thursday that he still was reviewing the court’s order for a June 14 execution date and hadn’t yet met with his client. Soucie said he expects to file additional motions in Moore’s case, but didn’t know whether those would be in state or federal court.
The state’s last execution was in 1997, when Robert Williams was electrocuted for killing three women. Eleven men remain on Nebraska’s death row after one man died earlier this week.
Six days before Moore was scheduled to be executed in 2007, the state’s high court issued a stay because it wanted to consider whether the electric chair should still be used. The court ruled in 2008 that the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
Nebraska lawmakers voted to replace the electric chair with lethal injection as its preferred execution method in 2009.
The Nebraska Supreme Court said in its order scheduling Moore’s execution that it’s not aware of any pending court action in the case challenging Moore’s conviction or sentence, but legal challenges to the state’s new execution method could still put capital punishment on hold for several years in the state.
Death penalty opponents have argued that state and federal courts should further evaluate Nebraska’s new procedures before any execution takes place.
Attorneys who oppose the death penalty have said they expect lawsuits will be filed attacking various components of the new lethal injection protocol. The law also is expected to be challenged under federal civil-rights law.
Gov. Dave Heineman’s administration is prepared to carry out the state Supreme Court’s order in June, spokeswoman Jen Rae Hein said Thursday. Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning’s spokeswoman, Shannon Kingery, said the court’s execution warrant for Moore speaks for itself.
Nebraska’s lethal-injection law and the execution procedure prison officials developed were modeled on Kentucky’s system because that state’s death penalty withstood the scrutiny of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008.
The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services said last summer that it had prepared a new execution chamber and trained workers to carry out the death penalty once the state obtained the sodium thiopental that will be used to render an inmate unconscious. The other drugs involved in the process are pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes an inmate’s breathing, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
In January, the state received the third drug needed to carry out an execution by lethal injection from an Indian supplier. A worldwide shortage of the drug, sodium thiopental, has made it hard to acquire.
Since Nebraska bought its supply, Kayem Pharmaceutical has stopped selling sodium thiopental to American prison officials, and the sole American manufacturer of the drug stopped making it in 2009.
The source of Nebraska’s sodium thiopental could also delay Moore’s execution. Death row inmates in Arizona, California and Tennessee have sued over drugs imported in those states and alleged the FDA knowingly allowed the import of a drug that hadn’t been approved by the agency.
Nebraska’s five-page lethal injection protocol requires that three drugs be administered during an execution by trained corrections workers, including two emergency technicians who would be responsible for maintaining an open IV line.
Now that an execution date has been set, members of the execution team who have already received training will undergo weekly refresher courses.
When no execution dates are scheduled, the team trains every six months.
