Lethal injection fight predicted

LINCOLN -- Nebraska will guarantee a long legal battle if it adopts a three-drug protocol to carry out executions via lethal injection, the head of an anti-death penalty group said this morning.

A botched execution in Ohio in September, and that state's abrupt shift to a one-drug protocol last week, should prompt Nebraska to shift its proposed protocol for lethal injection from three drugs to just one, said Jill Francke, statewide coordinator of Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty.

Francke predicted the Ohio experience will prompt a new round of lawsuits about lethal injection. "If we didn't think the litigation would be long and expensive before Ohio, I think we can guarantee it now," she said.

The Nebraska Legislature last year adopted lethal injection as the state's method of execution following a state Supreme Court ruling that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment.

This morning, the Nebraska Department of Corrections held a public hearing on its proposed protocol for carrying out an execution via lethal injection, the method used by 35 other states. It calls for the injection of a series of three drugs to cause death, which is the method commonly used.

Ohio is shifting to one drug -- a powerful anesthetic, thiopental sodium, which is used to euthanize animals -- instead of three. The shift came after the botched execution of convicted murderer Romell Broom in September in which executioners were repeatedly unable to find a suitable vein to inject the drugs.

In the proposed three-drug protocol, the first drug knocks out an inmate, the second causes paralysis and the third, death by stopping the heart.

Death penalty opponents argue that paralyzing an inmate makes it impossible to tell if the condemned inmate is being tortured by pain before dying. The single-drug technique amounts to an overdose of anesthesia.

George Green, an attorney for the department of corrections, said it would be several weeks before the department decides if the protocol should be approved or revised. The governor and attorney general must OK the rules before they go into effect.

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