Nebraska Executes Carey Dean Moore in First Execution in 21 Years

On August 14, 2018, more than two decades after last putting a pris­on­er to death, Nebraska exe­cut­ed Carey Dean Moore (pic­tured). The exe­cu­tion — which used an untest­ed drug for­mu­la of diazepam (the seda­tive Valium), fen­tanyl cit­rate (an opi­oid painkiller), cisatracuri­um besy­late (a par­a­lyt­ic), and potas­si­um chlo­ride to stop the heart — took 23 min­utes. It was the state’s first exe­cu­tion ever by lethal injection. 

The first drug, diazepam, was admin­is­tered at 10:24 am, and Moore, who had spent 38 years on death row, was pro­nounced dead at 10:47. Associated Press reporter Grant Schulte, a media wit­ness who kept a time­line of events dur­ing the exe­cu­tion, report­ed that on three occa­sions prison offi­cials dropped a cur­tain that pre­vent­ed the wit­ness­es from see­ing por­tions of the exe­cu­tion, and that towards the end of the pro­ce­dure Moore’s face turned red­dish, then purple. 

Joe Duggan, a jour­nal­ist for the Omaha World-Herald, said the media wit­ness­es could see the IV-line con­nect­ed to Moore’s arm, but could not see into the room where prison per­son­nel con­trolled the flow of the drugs. “[I]t was not pos­si­ble for us to know exact­ly when each drug was admin­is­tered,” he said. 

Brent Martin, report­ing for Nebraska Radio Network, com­pared Moore’s exe­cu­tions to the 13 exe­cu­tions he had pre­vi­ous­ly wit­nessed in Missouri, say­ing ​“this was much longer.” He also not­ed that the Nebraska team ​“approached it a bit dif­fer­ent­ly” than had cor­rec­tions offi­cials in Missouri, where exe­cu­tions had ​“become rou­tine.” But, he said, ​“I did­n’t get any sense that it did not go oth­er than how they planned it to go.” 

Later, prison offi­cials acknowl­edged the cur­tain had been low­ered after the last drug was admin­is­tered, pre­vent­ing the reporters from wit­ness­ing Moore’s reac­tion to that drug. 

Before the exe­cu­tion, Moore gave a writ­ten final state­ment in which he apol­o­gized to his younger broth­er, Don, for ​“bring­ing him down,” and asked oppo­nents of the death penal­ty to work on behalf of four men on Nebraska’s death row who he said are innocent. 

Capital pun­ish­ment has been a con­tentious issue in Nebraska. In 2015, the state leg­is­la­ture repealed the death penal­ty over the veto of Governor Pete Ricketts. Ricketts then spon­sored a vot­er ref­er­en­dum to rein­state the death penal­ty, which suc­ceed­ed in 2016. The state’s last exe­cu­tion had been in December 1997, when Robert Williams was exe­cut­ed in the state’s elec­tric chair. The near­ly 21-year peri­od between exe­cu­tions in the longest time any state has gone between exe­cu­tions in mod­ern U.S. history.

Nebraska was the sev­enth state to have car­ried out an exe­cu­tion in 2018. Moore was the 16^th per­son to be exe­cut­ed in the U.S. this year.