Nebraska abolishes death penalty, Governor vows to execute last 10 inmates out of spite

[Cheese Sandwich]

Out of Spite: The Governor of Nebraska’s Threat to Execute Prisoners
After his state abolishes the death penalty, Governor Pete Ricketts vows to apply it to the ten inmates still on death row.

“A punitive impulse has controlled criminal justice in America for almost half a century,” Columbia law professor Robert Ferguson writes in his searing book, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment. Surveying law, history, philosophy, and literature, Ferguson grapples with Americans’s peculiar commitment to punishment (rather than, say, rehabilitation, justice, or utility) as the aim of our justice system. “American attitudes toward legal punishment have entered a fantasy land of inconsistencies so intense that there seems to be no possible return to reality,” Ferguson told me recently.

And that was even before Governor Pete Ricketts of Nebraska threatened to begin executing prisoners more or less out of spite.

On May 27, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the Nebraska Legislature approved LB268, which abolishes the state’s death penalty. 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.

more: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/a-governor-threatens-to-execute-prisoners-out-of-spite/394949/

[rurallib]

1. cage matches to the death: Ricketts vs. the condemned person

could stage it at Wrigley Field.