Nebraska is on the verge of becoming the first conservative state in over 40 years to abolish the death penalty.
In a bipartisan 32-15 vote on Wednesday, Nebraska's legislature gave the final approval to a bill abolishing the death penalty, replacing it with life without parole, reported The Associated Press.
The state's Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, has promised to veto the bill, but such an act would likely only be symbolic. Lawmakers in the state's unicameral legislature appear to have a veto-proof majority, in the form of a coalition of religious conservatives and civil-rights advocates.
During the two-hour debate, state lawmakers from one of the most conservative states in the nation cited a number of reasons for changing their view on the death penalty, including religious reservations along with increased difficulty obtaining the drugs used for lethal injections. Also mentioned was the seemingly arbitrary application of the death penalty for some murderers but not others, the possibility of wrongful convictions, and the emotional exhaustion suffered by the families of death row inmates, according to Reuters. Other conservatives cast the death penalty as "a waste of taxpayer money and question whether government can be trusted to manage it," according to AP.
"The conservative Republicans' positions as expressed in Nebraska are basically a microcosm of what's going on with conservatives about the death penalty nationwide," Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Christian Science Monitor. "Abolition in Nebraska could empower conservatives in other 'red' states to move forward because they know it can be done."
Nebraska is one of 32 states that impose the death penalty, but the state hasn't conducted an execution since 1997, when the electric chair was used, according to AP. State law now requires executions to be carried out via lethal injection, but the state hasn't yet imposed that punishment on anyone. The state also voted in 1979 to ban executions, but then-Gov. Charles Thone vetoed the bill and lawmakers didn't attempt an override. There are currently 11 inmates on death row in Nebraska.
According to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject, released in October 2014, Americans favor the death penalty by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. A Pew Research Center poll from April of this year found that while a 56 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for those convicted of murder, support in general is as low as it's been in the past 40 years.
