Nebraska Must Vote on Death Penalty in 2016

Nebraska citizens will vote on whether or not the state should have the death penalty four months after it was suspended by the state legislature.

The vote is the result of a petition effort by people who support the death penalty, including Gov. Pete Ricketts, who donated vast sums of his personal fortune to the signature drive, The New York Times reports.

The ability for the drive to amass 143,000 signatures means that the issue will be placed on the 2016 ballot. It also means that the law which ended the death penalty has been suspended, meaning that the death penalty is once again the law of the land in Nebraska. The success of the petition has raised a host of thorny questions that do not have immediate answers.

For example, will the death penalty for the 10 people currently on death row once again be reinstituted, since it was previously canceled with the law banning the death penalty? Another question is whether an execution could be carried out in the time between now and the referendum. There is also the question of how such an execution could take place, as Nebraska, like Georgia, Oklahoma, and other states, has struggled to get the drugs needed to carry out lethal injections.

The petition effort itself is also the subject of a legal battle, because it was not at first made public that the governor was a major backer of the initiative and had donated $200,000. Nebraska state law mandates that the sponsors of petition drives be made public.

Another lawsuit says that the petition was worded in an "unlawfully misleading" way because it suggested that if there was no death penalty, life sentences for the most heinous of crimes would also not be possible.