Death penalty repeal considered

The Judiciary Committee heard a bill March 4 that would repeal Nebraska’s death penalty.

Introduced by Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, LB268 would replace death penalty provisions with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. The bill would apply retroactively to inmates currently serving capital punishment sentences. It was the 38th time that Chambers has introduced such legislation.

The bill would not prevent a sentencing court from ordering restitution, or alter the authority of the state Department of Correctional Services to determine appropriate measures for incarceration of an offender.

Chambers said that between 1903 and 2010, Nebraska executed 23 out of 72 people who had been sentenced to death. Executions do not occur frequently enough to stop people from killing one another, he said.

“It is clear that this is not a penalty of punishment that is relied on to do anything,” Chambers said. “Something so seldom used could not be a deterrent.”

Miriam Kelle, whose brother was murdered by Michael Ryan in Rulo, testified in support of the bill. Ryan is awaiting execution after being found guilty in 1985 of murdering Kelle’s brother James Thimm and another person.

Kelle said her family has suffered for 30 years waiting for Nebraska’s legal system to deliver the justice it promised. Sentencing Ryan to life in prison instead of death row would have allowed her family to move forward, she said.

“Only when we end the death penalty in Nebraska will we stop making the painful promise to victims’ families like mine,” Kelle said.

Former Sarpy County District Judge Ronald Reagan also testified in support of the bill. Reagan said he decided that the death penalty had no deterrent effect while presiding on the panel that sentenced John Joubert to death in 1984.

Joubert, who was executed by electric chair in 1996 for the murder of two boys, ignored the fact that he could have taken one of his victims to Iowa, a state less than two miles away with no death penalty, Reagan said.

States without the death penalty do not have higher murder rates than states with capital punishment, he added.

“We can repeal the death penalty and there will be no detrimental harm to public safety,” Reagan said.

Jeff Patterson, an attorney representing four of the six Nebraskans wrongly convicted for the 1985 murder of Helen Wilson in Beatrice, spoke in favor of the bill. The threat of execution can create false confessions, he said, and was a factor that caused two of his clients to experience psychotic delusions that they were involved in a crime they did not commit.

“For the Beatrice Six it certainly encouraged pleas, but it encouraged innocent people to plea to crimes they didn’t commit,” Patterson said. “The threat of a death penalty did not serve the interest of justice.”

Don Kleine, representing the Nebraska County Attorneys Association, testified in opposition to the bill. The death penalty is sought only for especially heinous crimes, he said.

“In certain extreme, unique situations, we believe there needs to be the death penalty,” Kleine said.

The committee took no immediate action on the bill.