Ex-public defender: Nebraska death row inmate’s sentencing may have been unconstitutional 

Former public defender Robert Dunham thinks the sentencing of Nebraska’s longest-serving death row inmate, Carey Dean Moore, may not have been legal.

Dunham, who is the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, says Nebraska’s death penalty system is not like those in some states — judges rather than juries decide whether a defendant should be sentenced to die — and that could raise grounds for a constitutional challenge.

“In Nebraska, the sentencing is done by a three-judge panel and the United States Supreme Court has ruled that a defendant in a death penalty case has a constitutional right to have a jury determine the facts that make him eligible for the death penalty, and that didn’t happen in his case,” Dunham told Hill.TV co-hosts Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on “Rising.”

Dunham is referring to the 2002 case Ring v. Arizona.

In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s capital sentencing procedure violated the Sixth Amendment’s jury trial guarantee by entrusting a judge to find the factors necessary for imposing the death penalty.   

But since Moore has not authorized his lawyers to attack this particular aspect of the state’s system, Dunham said, “it’s probable that he was unconditionally sentenced to death.”

Moore has tried to challenge his death row sentence on multiple occasions, and also tried to escape death row by attempting to swap clothes with his then-incarcerated twin brother.

But the 60-year-old inmate has since accepted his punishment and has made it clear to his lawyers that he doesn’t want to fight his scheduled execution on August 14.  

Moore was sentenced to death for the murder of two Omaha cab drivers in 1979. If the state follows through, it would mark the state’s first execution in more than two decades.

Nebraska, like many states, has been struggling with the financial and moral obligations of the death penalty for some time. The Nebraska Legislator overrode Gov. Pete Ricketts’s (R) veto and repealed the death penalty in 2015. But it was reinstated a year later after Ricketts personally bankrolled a referendum to bring it back. 

— Tess Bonn