Lethal injection challenge seen

Michael Nelson, attorney for Michael Ryan, the Rulo cult leader, addressed the Suburban Rotary Club Thursday on the subject of the death penalty.

Ryan’s case is basically on hold since the state abolished use of the electric chair, he said.

“In the last session of the Legislature, they passed an execution procedure -- death by lethal injection,” he said. “That’s going to be challenged, there’s going to be years of challenges for that.”

Eventually, he predicted, “we’re going to start killing people with lethal injection in Nebraska.”

Nelson said he has been insulted, ignored, and called “an instrument of evil” in the course of his career defending death-row inmates.

Another image, he said, was of “St. George on a white charger . . .slaying the dragon of capital punishment.”

Nelson has been doing death penalty work since 1995. Ryan, who has been on death row since 1986, is currently the only man he represents condemned to death.

Neson said the reason the death penalty process was drawn out, complex and expensive was “the value we put on human life, and the extreme care we take before we end human life,” he said.

“The way we do things in our country, that fact that I can do what I can do, says a lot, I believe, about American values,” he added later.

Nelson said when he first got involved in death row cases, back in 1995, he favored the death penalty.

“But having seen this system up close and personal, I now favor a system of mandatory life sentence,” he said.

“They actually have that in the federal system,” he said. “If you are sentenced to life in prison in the federal system, you die in the prison hospital. No parole, no possibility of parole.”

Rotarian Trenton Magid called Nelson’s speech an interesting and thought-provoking one.

Afterward, Nelson was asked what message he hoped Rotarians took away from his presentation.

“Change the system to life without parole,” Nelson said. “Change that system.”

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