"Executions not likely soon," is by Todd Cooper and Joe Duggan for the Omaha World-Herald.
It's a contest neither man wants to win.
But the race — or crawl — to become Nebraska's first prisoner to die by lethal injection now involves two people: Carey Dean Moore, Nebraska's longest-serving death row inmate, and cult leader Michael Ryan, on death row since 1986.
It remains to be seen who will emerge at the top of the waiting list.
Attorneys associated with both men said Friday that they doubt an execution will take place any time soon.
Michael A. Nelsen, an Omaha attorney who formerly represented Ryan, said he was baffled why Attorney General Jon Bruning sought a death warrant for Ryan this week with one already pending in Moore's case.
Meanwhile, attorney Jerry Soucie said Moore's case will be hounded by one major issue: whether the state "tortured" Moore by setting an execution date in June, despite knowing it had problems with its death drugs.
Those problems — neither the state nor the pharmaceutical company in India had proper licenses for the importation of one of the drugs — delayed Moore's execution for more than six months. Corrections officials announced this week they have rectified the issue with a new, legal supply of the drug, sodium thiopental.
Nevertheless, Soucie was in a Douglas County District Court courtroom Friday urging a judge to allow him to delve into state records about what the attorney general knew about the drug supplier in May as he worked to bring about Moore's execution. A month earlier, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had informed state officials they lacked the authority to import the drug.
"I can't think of anything that's a greater level of prosecutorial misconduct," said Soucie, an attorney with the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy. "It is just as reprehensible for the state to (do this) as it would be to parade someone in front of a (firing) squad with no bullets."
Dave Cookson, chief deputy attorney general, said when the state requested the death warrant in January, it had a supply of sodium thiopental from India that had cleared U.S. Customs and Border Protection with no objections by the federal government.
Earlier coverage of the lethal injection debate in Nebraska begins at the link.
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