LINCOLN — Attorney General Jon Bruning asked the Nebraska Supreme Court on Monday to set a new execution date for convicted killer Carey Dean Moore.
Bruning made the request three days after state corrections officials reported they were prepared to carry out a lethal injection.
The officials said Nebraska received a shipment this month of a chemical needed for an execution. The chemical expires in August 2012.
But expected legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection law and its three-drug protocol could delay any execution, potentially beyond that date.
Alan Peterson of Lincoln, Moore’s longtime attorney, said there are still legal matters to be decided in Moore’s case.
He said he has not had a chance to talk with Moore since the new filing to find out what direction Moore wants to take.
In the meantime, ACLU Nebraska attorneys will meet Tuesday to consider a challenge to the rule-making process used by state officials to set the lethal injection protocol.
“This is potentially a long row to hoe for the killing machine,” said Amy Miller, legal director for the group.
No executions have been set and no courts have reviewed Nebraska’s lethal injection law since lawmakers passed it in 2009.
Moore, 53, was sentenced to die in 1980 for the murders of two Omaha cabdrivers. His case is the oldest among the 12 men on death row.
The court set an execution date for Moore in 2007, then issued a stay of execution that has been in effect ever since.
At the time, the court said it needed to decide first on the constitutionality of the electric chair, which was then Nebraska’s sole method of execution.
The court ruled the following year that electrocution was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.
In 2009, another death row inmate, Raymond Mata Jr., filed a motion attacking the constitutionality of lethal injection before the new law had taken effect.
The high court refused to hear the challenge, leading attorneys to predict that court scrutiny would occur later.
In Monday’s filing, Bruning said Nebraska has a constitutionally acceptable method of execution available.
The filing cited a Kentucky case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 that upheld lethal injection as a method of execution.
The last person executed in Nebraska was Robert Williams, who was put to death in 1997.
World-Herald staff writer John Schreier contributed to this report.
Contact the writer: 402-473-9583, martha.stoddard@owh.com
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