Capital punishment in Nebraska
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Nebraska.
Though the state unicameral legislature passed its repeal on May 2015 over governor Pete Ricketts' veto, the measure has not gone into force due to a veto referendum campaign that gathered enough signatures to suspend it. The death penalty thus remained legal in the state, until the electorate voted to reinstate it on November 8, 2016.
Nebraska has currently 10 inmates on death row. All are convicted of either multiple murders or child murder.
Historically, hanging was the method Nebraska used until the execution of Albert Prince in 1913. After Prince's execution, a new law was passed requiring the electric chair as the method of execution. Allen Grammer was the first person executed by electrocution in Nebraska (his partner in crime, Alson Cole would be executed 13 minutes later).
The most famous execution ever carried out in the state of Nebraska is that of mass murderer Charles Starkweather, who killed 11 people in a two-month murder spree along with his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate.
On February 8, 2008, the Nebraska Supreme Court declared in State v. Mata that electrocution constitutes a "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Nebraska Constitution. The state legislature subsequently approved a bill to change its method of execution to lethal injection, which was signed by governor Dave Heineman on May 28, 2009. Nebraska was the last state to adopt lethal injection as its execution method, but no execution by injection has yet been carried out.
A total of 37 individuals have been executed in Nebraska, including three after 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia.
The last execution in the state was in 1997, when Robert Williams was electrocuted for the murder of Patricia McGarry and the subsequent rape and murder of Catherine Brooks. He also murdered a third woman in Minnesota.
A controversy happened in 2011 and 2012 when state officials imported sodium thiopental on two occasions from foreign suppliers, based in India and Switzerland. The furnishers said they discovered only after delivering the drugs that these would be used in judicial executions, prompting them to demand the return of the chemicals. The state refused, and engaged in a legal battle with the FDA and the suppliers to keep them. Since the drugs all expired in 2013 and became unusable, the state was unable to carry out any execution until it found another way to get the chemicals.
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