Ashby Jones from the Wall Street Journal covered the visible shift among Republicans on their support of the death penalty. He said,
Nebraska’s Republican-dominated Legislature is making a concerted push to do away with the state’s death penalty, the latest sign of cracks in conservatives’ once-bedrock support for capital punishment.
When lawmakers voted 30-13 vote to repeal the state’s death penalty last week, Republicans delivered 17 of the votes in favor of the measure, outnumbering the 13 votes Republicans cast against it.
One of the leading Nebraska Republican death penalty opponents is Senator Colby Coash who was interviewed for this article. Ashby Jones wrote,
“If any other system in our government was as ineffective and inefficient as is our death penalty, we conservatives would have gotten rid of it a long, long time ago,” said Sen. Colby Coash, a Republican from Lincoln.
I also spoke with Ashby Jones and discussed why conservatives are increasingly supporting repeal of the death penalty. He wrote,
“The death penalty fails to live up to a lot of conservative ideals,” said Marc Hyden, a coordinator with Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a group launched in 2013. “It’s not pro-life, it’s not limited-government, and it doesn’t deter crime.”