Nebraska's attorney general has chosen Norfolk killer Jose Sandoval as the next condemned prisoner to die, after a 20-year hiatus in executions in this state.
No request to the Nebraska Supreme Court for an execution warrant has been made, but Corrections Director Scott Frakes served notice to Sandoval on Thursday of the lethal injection drugs that would be administered to cause his death if an execution takes place.
That combination of drugs chosen has never been used in an execution.
State regulations require the prisons chief to notify condemned inmates 60 days prior to the attorney general requesting an execution warrant.
Attorney General Doug Peterson said he is prepared to request the Supreme Court issue Sandoval's execution warrant after at least 60 days have elapsed from the notice.
Corrections officials have chosen a new protocol for administering lethal injection drugs and have purchased diazepam, fentanyl citrate, cisatracurium besylate and potassium chloride.
The drugs were purchased in the United States and received into the department's inventory Oct. 10, said Dawn-Renee Smith, spokeswoman for the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.
She would not name the company or suppliers from which they were purchased, or say whether the supplier was local or a compounding company.
The Journal Star is pursuing the answers to those and other questions.
Nevada has a similar drug protocol, but uses three drugs: fentanyl, diazepam and cisatracurium.
That protocol is in question after a judge said Wednesday she may cut a paralytic (cisatracurium) from the state’s previously untried lethal injection plan, after hearing that it could mask movements reflecting awareness and pain, according to The Associated Press.
The Nebraska department has tested its drugs for quality, according to a Corrections news release.
Sandoval, 38, is housed on death row at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution. He was convicted and sentenced to death 13 years ago for killing five people at the U.S. Bank branch in Norfolk in September 2002.
Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, a longtime opponent of the death penalty, said in spite of the notice he doubted an execution was going to be carried out any time soon.
He and others need to know where the drugs came from, and whether there was a private compounding company manufacturing them, he said.
Other issues that have to be resolved, he said, include whether or not this combination of drugs has been used anywhere else, even though that would not bind Nebraska; whether or not the combination of drugs would be effective in accomplishing an execution; and whether they were designed to be used to take someone's life.
The Associated Press reported in April that a German pharmaceutical company spokesman said the potassium chloride the Nebraska Corrections Department had purchased in 2015 was not intended to be sold to a state corrections department.
A distributor had tried unsuccessfully to get the department to return the drugs.
The fact that the department is withholding certain information, Chambers said, indicates it is not fully transparent and may feel there are weaknesses in what it is doing.
Chambers charged that the notice of intended execution drugs is timed to coincide with Gov. Pete Ricketts re-election campaign.
Ricketts responded, saying: "Last year the people of Nebraska reaffirmed that the death penalty remains an important part of protecting public safety in our state."
Thursday's announcement is the next step to carrying out the sentences ordered by the court, he said.
ACLU of Nebraska Executive Director Danielle Conrad said the organization was “horrified" that the department planned to use Sandoval as a "test subject for an untested and experimental lethal injection cocktail."
"This rash decision will not fix the problems with Nebraska’s broken death penalty and are a distraction from the real issues impacting Nebraska’s Department of Corrections: an overcrowded, crisis-riddled system," she said.
America is a nation turning away from the death penalty, Conrad said, with more and more states seeing that ending capital punishment means improving public safety. Fiscal conservatives, faith leaders and public safety officials are increasingly leading efforts to replace the death penalty.
“The ACLU will continue to discuss the state’s misguided plan with experts locally and nationally and evaluate the grave constitutional, legal and policy questions associated with this untested protocol,” she said.
The attorney general said in a statement he agrees with the notice that was given to Sandoval.
"Sandoval planned the Sept. 26, 2002, Norfolk bank robbery when, in less than a minute, five innocent people were brutally shot and killed," Peterson said in a news release.
The dead included bank employees and customers. Sandoval personally killed three people, two more people were killed, and three more were in the midst of the gunfire that day. Sandoval’s crimes were captured on video.
The Nebraska Supreme Court upheld Sandoval’s convictions and death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court then denied further review of the sentence. Sandoval never filed any challenges to the Supreme Court decisions, Peterson said.
The last execution in Nebraska was Robert Williams in December 1997. It was carried out using the electric chair.
Source: Lincoln Journal Star, JoAnne Young, November 9, 2017
Nebraska to use 4 drugs never tried together in an execution
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska’s corrections department took a key step Thursday to prepare for the state’s first execution since 1997, unveiling a new combination of lethal injection drugs that no state has ever used on an inmate before.
The state Department of Correctional Services notified death-row inmate Jose Sandoval of the lethal injection drugs to be used in his execution, although no date has been set.
State officials are required to notify an inmate of the drugs to be used at least 60 days before Nebraska’s attorney general asks the state Supreme Court for an execution warrant. A spokeswoman for the attorney general said state attorneys plan to seek the warrant after the waiting period has ended.
The announcement came almost one year to the day after Nebraska voters reinstated capital punishment, overriding state lawmakers who had abolished the death penalty in defiance of Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts.
“Last year, the people of Nebraska reaffirmed that the death penalty remains an important part of protecting public safety in our state,” Ricketts said in a written statement. “Today’s announcement by the corrections department is the next step towards carrying out the sentences ordered by the court.”
A corrections department spokeswoman said the state intends to use the sedative diazepam, commonly known as Valium; the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl citrate; the paralytic cisatracurium (sis-at-rah-KYUR’-ee-um); and potassium chloride to induce death.
The department has access to all four drugs, and all were purchased in United States, said correctional services spokeswoman Dawn-Renee Smith. Smith, responding to questions by email, did not say how the drugs were obtained or who provided them.
Nevada officials have been pushing to use three of those drugs in a scheduled execution on Tuesday. On Thursday, a Nevada state court judge ordered state officials not to use the paralytic cisatracurium. Federal public defenders argued that the paralytic could prevent observers from seeing if the condemnded inmate suffers during his death. Nevada officials also plan to use diazepam and fentanyl.
Sandoval, 38, was sentenced to death on five counts of first-degree murder for the September 2002 deaths of five people in a bank robbery in Norfolk, a city of 24,000 about 110 miles northwest of Omaha. It’s unclear whether he has an attorney. The Norfolk lawyer who handled his most recent appeals did not immediate respond to a phone message.
“He has to be given some sort of opportunity to challenge it,” said Jeffery Pickens, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy, which has represented other death-row inmates. The commission cannot represent Sandoval because it defended some of the other men convicted in the crime, so it has a conflict.
Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers, a longtime death penalty opponent who sponsored the repeal law in 2015, said he believes the execution announcement was politically motivated.
Ricketts vetoed the death penalty repeal measure during his first year in office, and suffered a political blow when lawmakers overrode him. The former TD Ameritrade executive also helped bankroll the petition drive to place the issue on the November 2016 ballot with $300,000 of his own money. Nebraska voters reinstated the death penalty. Ricketts is up for re-election in 2018.
“They’re a good long ways from being able to carry out an execution,” Chambers said. “But I think the timing is suspicious.”
Chambers predicted that attorneys for Sandoval would “tear into” the state’s plan and create more delays. Nebraska’s last execution was in 1997, using the electric chair. The state has never carried out an execution with lethal injection drugs.
Ricketts did not address Chambers’ criticism in his statement.
State officials chose a combination of drugs that has never been used before in an execution, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a national group that has questioned the way executions are performed.
Dunham said the use of a paralytic could effectively hide any pain an inmate experiences during the execution, thus obscuring whether the execution was carried out without causing unconstitutional pain and suffering.
“It’s literally human experimentation, because no one has done it,” Dunham said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work, but it means there are serious questions about it.”
Potassium chloride has been used in other executions to stop an inmate’s heart, but it also caused severe chemical burns during a botched execution in Florida in 2014, Dunham said.
Source: The Associated Press, November 9, 2017
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
