State Sen. Ernie Chambers finally won his 38-year battle to get Nebraska's death penalty repealed.
With Wednesday's override vote in its one-house legislature, Nebraska became the nation's
19th state without a death penalty. The last time a conservative state abolished capital punishment was 42 years ago when North Dakota made the move. But since then eight states plus the District of Columbia have repealed their death penalty statutes. Two states—Connecticut and New Mexico—still have inmates on death row because the repeals were not made retroactive.
The supposedly nonpartisan Republican-dominated legislature had repealed the death penalty last week in a 32-14 vote, but the Republican governor vetoed it. Joe Duggan and Todd Cooper report:
The high-stakes vote to override the veto of Legislative Bill 268 was 30-19. It requires at least 30 of 49 senators to overturn a gubernatorial veto.
The outcome represented a defeat for first-term Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who made an all-out effort to peel away some of 18 conservative senators who helped pass the repeal bill. [...]
And it represents a crowning achievement for Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who has made repeal of the death penalty his top priority during his four-decade political career.
Republicans who voted for repeal did so for religious or fiscal reasons.
Nebraska has not executed anyone since 1997 when it electocuted Robert E. Williams, convicted of murdering three women. Ricketts was eager to change that and had recently ordered acquisition of the three drugs Nebraska had decided to use in the future for lethal injections of people sentenced to death.
There is more below the orange tangled web we weave.
Ricketts fought hard against the repeal. He called in reporters to witness his signing of the veto. He twisted arms of conservative senators or tried to. When the override was announced, he said in a written statement: “My words cannot express how appalled I am that we have lost a critical tool to protect law enforcement and Nebraska families. While the Legislature has lost touch with the citizens of Nebraska, I will continue to stand with Nebraskans and law enforcement on this important issue.”
Julie Bosman reports:
Catholic bishops in Nebraska issued a statement on Tuesday criticizing Mr. Ricketts’s veto. “We remain convinced that the death penalty does not deter crime, nor does it make Nebraska safer or promote the common good in our state,” they said.
It was the 38th time that the 77-year-old Chambers had introduced a death penalty repeal. In 1979, his bill passed the legislature only to be vetoed by the then-governor. There was no override that year. Chambers calls himself a loner and has encountered a great deal of resistance during his long tenure in the legislature. But that's not stopped him in various crusades, including making Nebraska the first state (in 1980) to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. Ed Pilkington of
The Guardian wrote last weekend:
His mission to end the death penalty in his state emanates from a conviction that he says he has had since he was a teenager. He puts that conviction in bold, simple terms: “I believe the state shouldn’t kill anybody. I don’t think anybody should kill anybody. If we tell people that as individuals they can’t kill anybody, then how can we kill somebody as a society? Just multiplying the number of people involved in the decision doesn’t make it right—whether it’s a mob or a state or anything else.” [...]
Pressed to give a less astronomical analysis, Chambers says that he believes that the conservatives who voted to abolish the death penalty were merely being true to their fundamental principles. “Conservatives have vowed that whenever they find a government program that isn’t working, they will scrap it. And if there is a government program that doesn’t achieve its goals, it’s the death penalty.”
He adds: “The irony is that the so-called conservatives are now giving the same arguments against the death penalty that the abolitionists have always given.”
Thanks to the relentless Chambers and his supporters in Nebraska and elsewhere in the nation, one more state has chosen the civilized road. Just 31 more to go.
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Wee Mama also has a discussion going on this subject.
