Why Nebraska Just Repealed Its Death Penalty
On Wednesday, Nebraska lawmakers abolished the death penalty in the conservative state by voting to override Gov. Pete Ricketts' veto of a historic bill passed last week. The veto was signed on Tuesday as Ricketts echoed familiar Republican arguments, saying repealing the death penalty would tell Nebraskan criminals that the state is “soft on crime.” The bill passed with a vote of 32 to 15, garnering 18 votes from Republican lawmakers and nine Republican cosponsors.
Nebraska is the first state to abolish the death penalty since Maryland in 2013, and the first Republican-controlled state since North Dakota repealed its death penalty in 1973. The state joins 18 others, along with the District of Columbia, leaving behind 31 death penalty states, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 56 percent of respondents said they supported the death penalty. But public support in the U.S. has fallen more than 20 percent since 1996. Fewer people are being sentenced to death than at any other time in the last two decades.
So, why should you care? These shifts are being driven by a combination of factors: The series of DNA exonerations have drawn attention to margin for human error, and the shortage of the drugs used in lethal injections has also contributed to the decrease in executions. Violent crime has also decreased steadily over the last 25 years. Increasing attention has been paid to the high cost of the death penalty, galvanizing bipartisan support for its abolishment. One study found that states paid an average of $1 million more per death row inmate’s case than for a case of a non–death row inmate, mainly because of legal costs.
“In many ways, the death penalty is already a thing of the past,” Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, told TakePart. To Rust-Tierney, Nebraska’s repeal and the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in the lethal injection case Glossip v. Gross point to the death penalty’s steady decline. “Are there still states that seek to execute people?” Rust-Tierney said. “Yes, but these jurisdictions are becoming increasingly isolated, and in their isolation we are seeing just how arbitrary and disconnected from public safety these executions are.”
Awareness of that disconnect has been accompanied by a group of conservatives' increasingly vocal disapproval of capital punishment.
Take Matt Maly. He’s a Nebraskan, an evangelical Christian, and a proud conservative: an advocate for limited government. He said his support for the repeal of the death penalty is largely rooted in his pro-life, antiabortion perspective. “I don’t trust the government with my health care, and I don’t trust the government with my mail. Why would I trust them with a matter of life or death?,” Maly, coordinator for the Nebraska chapter of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told TakePart. In his talks with fellow conservatives around the state, he said some drew the distinction between the innocent life of an unborn child and that of a convicted prisoner to justify their support of capital punishment. “But the government makes mistakes,” Maly said, pointing to the 153 death row inmates who have been exonerated since 1973.
Many of the conservatives Maly speaks with in his outreach efforts agree with him. Others, however, remain cautious about sharing their view publicly. As with Pickett, some of these conservatives in leadership roles are afraid of appearing soft on crime, Maly said.
Experts like Tierney-Rust believe Kansas, Montana, Delaware, and New Hampshire are all poised to abolish the death penalty within the next few years, as each state has seen vigorous debates over the possibility of repeal. Last year, conservative Montana came within one vote of repealing its death penalty.
Related stories on TakePart:
• The Death Penalty Is in Decline, So Why Is Utah Trying to Resurrect Firing Squads?
• The U.S. Is Still One of the World’s Top Executioners, but We’re Slowing Down
• Pharmacists to Prisons: Get Your Lethal Injection Drugs Somewhere Else
Original article from TakePart
