Associated Press
LINCOLN, Neb. — If inmate Carey Dean Moore is put to death, it would be Nebraska’s first execution since 1997 and its first lethal injection.
The office of Attorney General Jon Bruning filed a motion with the Nebraska Supreme Court on Monday, requesting that a date be set. Moore was sentenced to death for the 1979 murders of two Omaha cabbies.
The state’s last execution occurred in 1997, when Robert Williams was electrocuted for killing three women. Eleven men remain on Nebraska’s death row. Besides Williams, Harold Otey and John Joubert also have been electrocuted since the state resumed executions in 1994.
Moore’s attorney, Alan Peterson, did not immediately respond to a message Tuesday. Moore was convicted of first-degree murder for killing taxi drivers Maynard D. Helgeland and Reuel Eugene Van Ness in botched robberies.
Moore, 53, came within a week of being executed in 2007, but six days before his scheduled execution the state’s high court issued a stay because it wanted to consider whether the electric chair should still be used.
Then the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Since then, lawmakers approved lethal injection as the state’s sole method.
On Friday, the state received the third drug needed to carry out an execution by lethal injection. A worldwide shortage of the drug, sodium thiopental, had made it hard to acquire.
It was not immediately clear Tuesday how soon the Supreme Court might set an execution date for Moore.
But legal challenges to Nebraska’s new execution method could still put capital punishment on hold for several years in the state.
Attorneys who oppose the death penalty have said they expect lawsuits will be filed attacking various components of the new lethal injection protocol, including training requirements they say are vague.