Nebraska Is Again Shopping For Lethal Injection Drug

The latest update on the death-sentence saga of Cary Dean Moore is laden with detail but it’s not complicated.
The Department of Corrections screwed up when it purchased one of three drugs needed to kill condemned killers via lethal injection.

The department bought the drug from an outfit in India, since it is no longer manufactured in the United States.

The purchase raised several issues, the one of immediate importance being that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration told the department that Nebraska had no authority to be importing controlled substances.

The state said Wednesday it eventually jumped through the required hoops and obtained the federal permit needed to purchase and import the drug, sodium thiopental. And now it will go shopping.

Department officials said the drugs it previously obtained illegally will not be used in Moore’s execution.

Moore, 53, confessed to the premeditated murders of two Omaha cab drivers he robbed and shot to death in 1979. His case has been up and down the judicial ladders, state and federal, several times.

On April 21, the state Supreme Court scheduled his execution for June 14.

Moore’s attorney, Jerry Soucie, went to court in Douglas County and raised questions about the quality of the drug purchased in India. As a result, the Supreme Court stayed the execution May 25th.

Soucie is now questioning why the Department of Corrections didn’t advise the state Supreme Court of the controversy over its importation of the drug. The DEA had told the department it screwed up – several days before the Supreme Court set the new execution date.

The department says it didn’t need to report anything to the court, because it believed it would have the drug issue resolved before the execution date.

Moore is challenging the constitutionality of the lethal injection law on several grounds.

The Legislature adopted the law in 2009, after the state Supreme Court ruled electrocution to be unconstitutional. Nebraska was the last state to have electrocution as its sole means of execution.

The last execution in Nebraska occurred Dec. 2, 1997 when Robert Williams was put to death in the electric chair. He was convicted in the murders of Catherine Brook, Patricia McGarry and Virginia Rowe.