Death Penalty-Nebraska

Gov. Pete Ricketts speaks during a news conference, accompanied by a group of state senators and other supporters, regarding his veto of a bill passed by the legislature that would repeal the death penalty in Nebraska on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, in the Governor's Hearing Room at the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, Neb. On Wednesday, May 27, the legislature overrode his veto, abolishing the death penalty in Nebraska.

(Kristin Streff, Lincoln Journal Star via AP)

Nebraska senators vote to repeal the death penalty (LB268) on Wednesday, May 27, 2015 in Lincoln. Senators in the one-house Legislature voted 30-19 to override Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican who supports the death penalty. The vote makes Nebraska the first traditionally conservative state to eliminate the punishment since North Dakota in 1973.

This week's vote by the Nebraska legislature to override Republican Gov. Pete Rickett's veto of a bill that banned the death penalty could have major implications nationally.

While three out of four Republicans still favor executing convicted murderers, a Gallup poll found last year, the conservative case against capital punishment has been gaining momentum for years, Christian Science Monitor reported. And the fact a conservative state such as Nebraska has repealed the death penalty has energized death penalty opponents to get the practice abolished in other states as well.

This is a watershed moment," Heather Beaudoin told Christian Science Monitor, Beaudoin is a national organizer with the grassroots group Equal Justice USA, which sponsors the Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty network.

Nebraska is the first conservative state in the country to repeal the death penalty in 40 years, after North Dakota did it in 1973, NBC News reported

"The efforts and arguments of Nebraska conservatives are part of an emerging trend in the Republican Party, evidenced by the involvement of conservative Republicans in legislative efforts to repeal the death penalty in other states, such as Kansas, Kentucky, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming," Robert Dunham, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, said in a statement after the Nebraska vote, as Christian Science Monitor reported.

Since 2000, 40.2 percent of the executions in the United States have been conducted in Texas. Another 5 percent have occurred in Missouri, which last year matched Texas's total, The Washington Post reported.

A bill to abolish the death penalty in Montana came within one vote of passing in February in the Republican-led state House, The Associated Press reported. In Kansas, a GOP state representative took the lead in introducing a repeal bill this year, and the state's Republican Liberty Caucus formally came out in opposition to capital punishment in 2014.

Repealing the death penalty may be easier in Nebraska than states where capital punishment is more ingrained in the culture, said Eric Berger, a University of Nebraska associate law professor and death penalty expert, to The Associated Press.

"I don't see a state like Texas repealing capital punishment anytime soon, but there certainly is a movement that's gaining momentum," Berger told The Associated Press. "The anti-death penalty arguments are beginning to resonate with small-government conservatives. It doesn't guarantee there will be continued momentum, but I do think it's symptomatic of some changed thinking on the right."

Many across the nation have been disturbed by botched executions in states like Oklahoma, renewing questions about the humanity of lethal injections, Christian Science Monitor reported. In April, the Supreme Court heard arguments contesting one of the drugs used in a lethal injection cocktail. And 150 of these inmates, too, have been exonerated over the past few decades.

Support for the death penalty has slowly fallen over the past couple of decades, from a high of 80 percent in favor in the mid-1990s to just over 60 percent currently, which is near a 40-year low, according to Gallup, NPR News reported.

"There are spikes in death-penalty support appearing during particular eras of what can be described as fear mongering," Dunham told NPR, saying during the "red scare" of the 1950s, American support for the death penalty picked up. It fell off in the early 1960s, only to pick up again in the late 1960s and early 1970s after a rash of high-profile assassinations -- Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., for example, and the attempted assassination of George Wallace.

All of that contributed to a national conversation about the death penalty as the Supreme Court in 1972 found some death penalty statutes to be unconstitutional (effectively ending the practice for several years), but a 1976 decision opened the doors again. Then, racially charged political rhetoric on crime in the 1980s likewise fueled that support, as Dunham told NPR.

The emphasis on the War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s, especially stiff drug penalties, increased support for the death penalty. Bill Clinton, in fact, used his support of the death penalty to prove his tough-on-crime credentials in 1992, NBC News reported.

Conversely, public distrust of the government turns people against the policy, Dunham explained to NPR. During the Vietnam War era, for example, when people started to question the government's choices, they also questioned the death penalty as a valid form of punishment.

The stream of news about wrongful convictions -- and potential wrongful deaths -- is one of the main reasons Dunham gave for the recent decline in death penalty support, NPR reported.

"As more and more executions occurred, more and more injustices came to light," Dunham told NPR.

NBC News speculated between DNA testing raising doubts about some convictions which sparked the initial public questioning of the death penalty to the fact that crime didn't rise but dropped during the last recession, there is simply a sea change in how society views these issues. NBC also reported it's possible we are less than a generation away from the death penalty becoming nearly obsolete.

Beaudoin told Christian Science Monitor her group is traveling around the country, talking to student groups and conservative colleges and tea party gatherings in the South and getting a great response. She said they find themselves working "shoulder to shoulder" with progressives, who have long emphasized human rights, the racial disparities within the criminal justice system, and social equality.

"There were always those of us who were concerned about the death penalty, but we didn't have the space to talk about this issue on our own terms, or explain why we are concerned," Beaudoin told Christian Science Monitor.

Nebraska State Sen. Colby Coash, who led the campaign to ban capital punishment and overturn the governor's veto, told Christian Science Monitor conservatives in Nebraska were able to frame this debate as an inefficient government program. He added that for religious conservatives, capital punishment doesn't consistently fit into their views.

"One of the things that I said on the floor during the debate was, we're all created by God, we have a limited time here, and then he will decide when we're supposed to go home," Coash told Christian Science Monitor. "And government shouldn't really be messing around with that plan in deciding when somebody is going to die, and that shouldn't be our role."

But Ricketts said in a statement following the vote that state lawmakers have lost touch with Nebraska citizens.

"My words cannot express how appalled I am that we have lost a critical tool to protect law enforcement and Nebraska families," the Nebraska governor said in a statement, as Christian Science Monitor reported.

The Nebraska decision will probably have a much bigger effect outside the state's borders. The Washington Post reported, since only three men have been executed in the state since the death penalty was re-legalized by the Supreme Court in 1976, and 11 people in Nebraska sit on death row now.

"This could start a domino effect, for sure," Stacy Anderson, executive director of Nebraskans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told The Associated Press. "Many states are already looking at this. I joke with people who do the same kind of work in other states that we're in a race to see who can repeal it first."

National groups are watching Nebraska closely and expect a "ripple effect" now that the state has abolished the death penalty, Shari Silberstein, executive director of Equal Justice USA, told The Associated Press.

"A lot of states have stopped making this a partisan issue, and started to make it a conscience issue," Silberstein told The Associated Press. "The party's not going to tell you how to vote."