On August 27, the Huffington Post reported that it appears that enough signatures have been obtained to put the death penalty repeal on the ballot. Kim Bellware wrote,
Ninety days after the Nebraska legislature voted to repeal the death penalty, supporters of capital punishment say they have collected enough signatures to potentially bring it back.
Nebraskans For The Death Penalty beat the ballot referendum deadline by one day and on Wednesday afternoon delivered 166,692 signatures to Secretary of State John Gale’s office.
However, the signatures came at a very high financial cost, and it doesn’t change the fact that the death penalty is still irrevocably broken. Soon, all Nebraskans will have the opportunity to reject a failed government program.
Bellware continued,
Marc Hyden, the national advocacy coordinator of CCADP, estimated the opposition spent more than $600,000 on signature-gathering efforts.
“No matter how much money Governor Ricketts and his family spend on this referendum, it does not change the basic fact that they are trying to sell Nebraskans a lemon – a government program plagued by wrongful convictions, high costs, and long delays,” he added in a later statement.
Hyden also criticized Ricketts’ thorny attempts to import increasingly scarce lethal injection drugs from a broker in India. The Food and Drug Administration said such an import was illegal and that the agency would seize the drugs.
“Despite repeated promises, the Governor has failed to obtain the drugs needed to carry out even one execution,” Hyden said in the statement. “The Governor has given Nebraskans zero reason to believe that he can fix the state’s irreparably broken death penalty.”
The National Catholic Reporter’s Elizabeth Elliot also reported on the effort. She wrote,
“The broken nature of the death penalty has been on full display this summer with the ongoing fiasco surrounding the Governor’s attempts to illegally import lethal injection drugs from overseas,” said Marc Hyden, national coordinator for Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a project of Equal Justice USA.