The Nebraska legislature narrowly voted on Wednesday to repeal the death penalty, overriding the governor’s veto and making the state the first majority Republican state to abolish capital punishment in more than four decades.

The state has a unicameral legislature in which all bills must be voted on three times. The bill to abolish the death penalty passed all three rounds, 30-16, 30-13, and finally 32-15 in its third vote. The governor vetoed the bill on Tuesday.

Legislators needed 30 votes to override the veto, and it earned 30. Nineteen voted against. The repeal is the latest move in what some experts believe is a new conservative push against executions.

“In many respects, what has happened in Nebraska is a microcosm of the steady national trend away from the death penalty in the United States,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.



Nineteen states and the District of Columbia now ban the death penalty, and Nebraska becomes “the first predominantly Republican state to abolish the death penalty since North Dakota abolished the death penalty in 1973,” he said.

The ten men still on Nebraska’s death row will remain there, though the state hasn’t executed an inmate since 1997. The legislation passed Tuesday will abolish Nebraska’s method of execution, essentially stopping the men’s sentence from being carried out.

In Wednesday’s debate, senators spoke passionately for and against the death penalty, and many referenced the bible.

“Capital punishment is not perfect, but we need it,” said senator Lydia Brasch.



“Is it always fairly and equally administered? Probably not. Does it need to be there? Yes it does,” said senator Dave Bloomfield.

Senator Ernie Chambers, who has fought for decades to repeal the death penalty, addressed his fellow senators repeatedly.

“I wish that I could say that it was my brilliance that brought us to this point, but this would not be true, and we all know it. Had not the conservative faction decided it was time for a change, there’s no way that what is happening today would be happening today,” he said.



‘There has been a confluence of individuals groups and circumstances that have put Nebraska on the threshold of stepping into history, on the right side of history.”



Lawmakers in Nebraska have long tried to rule out the death penalty, carrying a bill in the legislature each year since 1981, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Many conservative lawmakers in the state have argued the punishment is not cost effective, or pointed to religious objections regarding the sanctity of life. The state was also the first to place a moratorium on executions while a study on its fairness was carried out, in 1999.

Nebraska reinstated the death penalty in 1973, following the Georgia v Furman US supreme court case that paused capital punishment in the country for three years (another Georgia case led to the death penalty’s reinstatement as a state’s rights issue).

Executions in the US have ground nearly to a halt this year as states wait to hear the result of a supreme court argument over whether one state’s execution protocol amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

The case, Glossip v Gross, was argued in the Supreme Court in April, and focuses on the drug cocktail used to carry out Oklahoma death sentences.

The state’s reliance on the drug midazolam led to the high-profile “botched” execution of Clayton Lockett, in which it took 43 minutes for the man to be pronounced dead. That led to a challenge by Oklahoma inmate Richard Glossip. Several death penalty states have relied on the drug as part of an execution cocktail since pentobarbital, long used for executions, became scarce as the result of a European-led boycott of execution drugs.

Nebraska does not use midazolam in its lethal injection process, but instead relies on a cocktail of similar drugs, which the governor recently said he had secured from a pharmacy in India.