Conservatives Against the Death Penalty: Does Nebraska Herald a New Trend?

The last time it worked was in 1979. The Nebraska Legislature, the unicameral legislative body of the American state in the Great Plains, voted to abolish the death penalty. However, the majority was not enough to override the governor’s veto. Afterward, Ernie Chambers, an independent, put forth the same proposal again every year, but in spite of that, it failed regularly in the Senate.

Success After Decades

But this year everything was different: Chambers’ bill did not just pass. With 30 yes votes against 19 no votes, the Legislature was even able to override Republican Governor Pete Rickett’s veto. On Wednesday, Nebraska became, after more than four decades, the first conservative state in the U.S. to formally abolish the death penalty since North Dakota in 1973. In the stands of the imposing state capitol in Lincoln, jubilation broke out.

With that, Nebraska joined the company of the 18 states and Washington, D.C., which, according to a list from the Death Penalty Information Center, have abolished the death penalty. Since 2007, six other states have of course also done so, but those were states with “liberal” tendencies or ones that are not clearly definable by party politics — Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York.

Supporters of the death penalty in Nebraska have, however, already announced that they will attempt to subject the question to a referendum. According to experience, though, that is more difficult than preventing the bill from passing, especially as the vote in the legislature showed that moral and religious guidelines are in no way still the only motivations to oppose the death penalty.

After a high point in the ‘90s, as the crack epidemic overwhelmed America and caused horrendous crime rates, especially in inner cities, the average number of supporters of the death penalty has continuously sunk across the country. According to a survey, which the Pew Research Center has evaluated for every year since 1935 and carried out itself since 1995, it currently rests at 56 percent, the lowest point since the ‘70s. The Death Penalty Information Center, from its side, comes to the conclusion on the basis of a survey from the year 2010 that 61 percent of those surveyed would support an alternative to the death penalty with lifelong imprisonment at its center.

What even the conservative Wall Street Journal found worthy of an article is the fact that in Nebraska, more conservatives spoke out for the abolition of the death penalty than for its preservation. Besides the traditional reservations against the final punishment through death — the wrong person could be convicted, or it is not the place of people to decide the death of another person — new voices have joined the choir: Those who see the death penalty as no longer appropriate for the times.

Inefficiency in the Crosshairs

Often appeals procedures before an execution have dragged on for decades, which represents an imposition for victims’ survivors — so argued the family of eight-year-old Martin Richard, who was killed in the attack on the Boston Marathon. For years the problems with the ingredients for lethal injections, the typical execution method in the U.S., because of an export ban from the EU, have added to this. In Utah, because of this, emergencies firing squads could form up again; in Tennessee, the electric chair could be brought out of storage. However, many states have imposed a de facto moratorium. If another government program was as unsuccessful and inefficient as the death penalty, opined Republican Senator Colby Coash at the debate in Lincoln, “We would have gotten rid of it a long time ago.”