Rob Edwards is with the group Nebraskans for the Death Penalty and he said, “We turned in 166,692 signatures, which is astounding”.
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That’s enough signatures to block the repeal of the death penalty from becoming law until voters decide the issue in November 2016.
There appears to be some disagreement as to whether the death penalty will be repealed beginning Sunday until the signatures can be verified.
A traditionally red state, Nebraska shocked many onlookers earlier this year when its unicameral, non-partisan state legislature approved a death-penalty repeal, then overrode Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto.
But getting the repeal took decades and the group named Nebraska Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty called Wednesday a big setback.
Death penalty opponents had hoped Nebraska could serve as an example for other conservative states that are considering abolition, but placing the issue before voters could demonstrate that the public still supports capital punishment.
Boxes filled with signatures gathered by the Nebraskan’s for the Death Penalty were turned in at the capitol Wednesday. The number of executions in the United States has gradually declined in recent years and only a handful of states led by Texas regularly put inmates to death.
She said the pro-repeal campaign has received widespread support statewide from fiscal conservatives, faith leaders, victims’ families and traditional death penalty opponents.
But the Nebraska Attorney General released a statement Wednesday saying, “During this verification process the signatures submitted to the Secretary of State are presumptively valid until determined otherwise”.
Even if the law is suspended, Nebraska now has no way to execute any of the 10 men on death row because its lacks two of the three required lethal injection drugs and has struggled to obtain them legally.
Ricketts and his father, Joe Ricketts, have been reported as the largest individual financial contributors to the campaign, which had raised $652,000 by the end of July, as reported to the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission.
The 35 executions carried out in 2014 was the lowest total in 20 years, according to the, which tracks capital punishment.
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“What the Nebraska Legislature did is going to have an effect”, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, whose group takes no stance on the death penalty but often criticizes how it’s administered.
