Governor Pete Ricketts of Nebraska Still Wants to Kill People

[phantom power]

A couple of weeks ago, you may recall, there was great exultation here at the shebeen when the unicameral legislature of Nebraska voted to abolish that state's death penalty, and then voted to override the governor's veto of said abolition. Well, Governor Pete Ricketts, a Tea Party butcher and board member of the American Enterprise Institute (Motto: We Iz Skolars For Hire), is so desperate to keep on killing people that he's ready to tear up the law to do it. Oh, he's a lovely fcker, this guy is.

Ricketts had vetoed the measure, but the legislature overrode his veto. Ricketts called for a voter referendum to overturn the repeal; then he said that the state would execute the ten prisoners currently under sentence of death anyway, using sodium thiopental imported from India.* Meanwhile, Senator Bill Kintner of the unicameral legislature sought to explain his support for executions by posting a photo of a beheaded woman on his Facebook page.

Garrett Epps's invaluable work on this case attaches the lawlessness in Nebraska to a case recently argued before the Nine Wise Souls in which we discovered (again) that Strip Search Sam Alito's definition of cruel and unusual punishment is roughly that of your average wolverine.

But the legalities fell away when Justice Samuel Alito asked this question: "Is it appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerilla war against the death penalty which consists of efforts to make it impossible for the States to obtain drugs that could be used to carry out capital punishment with little, if any, pain?"

And Antonin (Short Time) Scalia was worse.

Justice Antonin Scalia elaborated that the approved "drugs have been rendered unavailable by the abolitionist movement putting pressure on the companies that manufacture them so that the States cannot obtain those two other drugs. And now you want to come before the Court and say, well, this third drug is not 100 percent sure. ... [T]he abolitionists have rendered it impossible to get the 100 percent sure drugs, and you think we should not view that as—as relevant to the decision that—that you're putting before us?"

Funny how the "guerrilla campaign" against women's reproductive rights, which has included shooting doctors in church, in their kitchens, and also the bombing of clinics and the 1996 Olympic Games, hasn't bothered these two at all.

(Brief political announcement: This is why there remains more than a dime's worth of difference between the two parties. This is the mouthing of sociopaths.)

They're savages, all three of them, the two justices and the governor of Nebraska. The bloodlust in them is as revolting as their contempt for democracy and the law. Ricketts just wants to kill people. That's all he's about. One turn of the dial the wrong way and he's shooting up a Denny's.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35514/nebraska-governor-death-penalty/

[Takket]

1. can he actually do that?

I thought once a law was changed it was retroactive. I.E. if you are in jail for, say, having pot, and pot is made legal, they have to release you.

same for the death penalty. if you are sentenced to death, and the DP is banned, isn't that retroactive, and your sentence reverts to life in prison?

[Tommy_Carcetti]

2. Not necessarily.

The Maryland legislature recently abolished the death penalty, but it only impacted future prosecutions. It took an executive order from Governor O'Malley to commute the remaining 4 death sentences to life without parole.