Nebraska’s legislature has approved legislation that would abolish the death penalty in the state.
Lawmakers approved the legislation in a 32-to-15 vote despite the governor’s threat to veto it.
Many of the legislature’s senators cited their conservative principles as reason to oppose the death penalty. They called capital punishment bureaucratic and fiscally irresponsible. They also questioned whether government should have the authority to end a life.
In a statement prior to the vote, Gov. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., asked lawmakers not to “vote to repeal the death penalty and to give our state’s most heinous criminals more lenient sentences.”
“No one has traveled the state more than I have in the past 18 months, and everywhere I go there is overwhelming support for keeping the death penalty in Nebraska,” Ricketts said.
“This isn’t rhetoric. This is reality,” he added.
Ricketts has threatened to veto the legislation, but only 30 votes would be required to override the veto.
State Sen. Laura Ebke told the Associated Press that abolishing the death penalty is a conservative position.
“It’s certainly a matter of conscience, at least in part, but it’s also a matter of trying to be philosophically consistent,” Ebke said. “If government can’t be trusted to manage our health care … then why should it be trusted to carry out the irrevocable sentence of death?”
Some senators have previously tried and failed to enact a law ending capital punishment in the state.
State Sen. Ernie Chambers told the AP that “Nebraska has a chance to step into history—the right side of history—to take a step that will be beneficial toward the advancement of a civilized society.”
John Malcolm, the director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, said that the sheer bureaucratic difficulty of carrying out a death penalty is enough to make some reconsider:
“While a majority of Americans continue to believe that the death penalty is the only appropriate punishment for those who commit particularly heinous murders, death penalty opponents have certainly done an effective job at making it very difficult to carry out an execution in a relatively expeditious and humane fashion,” Malcolm said.
“Such maneuvers have also dramatically increased the cost of imposing the death penalty and have limited its value as a deterrent to other would-be murderers. This has caused even some conservatives to reevaluate the death penalty and has certainly been very frustrating to those who support the death penalty and to victims’ families,” he concluded.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there are 32 states including Nebraska where capital punishment is legal. They also note that Nebraska’s bill is “prospective only,” and should it become law, it will not affect the fate of the 11 inmates currently on the state’s death row.
Omaha’s KETV reports that Nebraska hasn’t conducted an execution since 1997.
The legislation’s approval comes shortly after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013.
A CBS Poll conducted in April found that 56 percent of Americans support the death penalty. CBS reports that it is the lowest approval rating for capital punishment since they began asking the question in 1988.
