With Drugs Expiring and Lawsuits Pending, Nebraska Prosecutors Seek to Expedite Execution

Facing an August 2018 expiration date for two of the drugs in Nebraska’s experimental execution protocol, state Attorney General Douglas Peterson (pictured) has asked the Nebraska Supreme Court to expedite consideration of the prosecutor’s request to set a July execution date for condemned prisoner Carey Dean Moore. The attorney general has petitioned the court to schedule Moore’s execution for July 10 “or alternatively for a date in mid-July,” despite the pendency of several lawsuits, which will not be resolved before August, that challenge various aspects of the state’s authority and ability to carry out executions.

Nebraska intends to use a four-drug execution protocol featuring three drugs—the opiod pain medication fentanyl, the sedative valium, and the paralytic drug cisatracurium—that have never before been used in an execution, followed by the heart-stopping drug potassium chloride. Potassium chloride has been described as feeling like liquid fire if administered to a person who has not been adequately anesthetized.

Several challenges to the state’s administration of the death penalty that have been filed by the ACLU of Nebraska are currently before the courts. These include a case on appeal before the Nebraska Supreme Court arguing that Governor Pete Ricketts and other state officials “improperly seized and exercised legislative power” when they allegedly “proposed, initiated, funded, organized, operated, and controlled the referendum campaign against” the death-penalty repeal law enacted by the state legislature over the governor’s veto in 2015; and a second lawsuit challenging the state’s lack of transparency surrounding execution drugs and team members, which is currently awaiting a trial-court ruling. The state Department of Corrections recently released some documents regarding execution team training in response to a public records request by the ACLU, but refused to provide documents indicating whether and to what extent execution team members had specialized experience or training in intravenous-access procedures or any documents relating to correspondence with doctors or experts regarding lethal injection.

ACLU of Nebraska Legal Director Amy Miller said that the documents released by the state provide “no adequate assurance that we would be looking at a smooth, well-conducted execution,” and remarked that “[t]he veil of secrecy that has dropped on all matters relating to the death penalty is very concerning.” Nebraska has never carried out an execution using lethal injection.

Moore, who was sentenced to death in 1980, is Nebraska’s longest incarcerated death-row prisoner. At trial, he waived his right to a jury and presented no evidence in his defense. He recently fired his current appointed counsel and has asked to be executed. In a statement released in April, ACLU of Nebraska’s Executive Director Danielle Conrad said, “it is precisely because [Moore] is not fighting that our institutions bear extra responsibility to check themselves by ensuring that the laws are followed and that an unlawful and potentially cruel and unusual execution does not take place.”