OMAHA -- Prosecutors and Republican leaders accused Nebraska lawmakers Thursday of ignoring their opinions on prison and criminal sentencing reform as the Legislature debated the issues this week.
“They mocked our input,” Attorney General Doug Peterson said during a news conference at City Hall in Omaha.
Peterson appeared alongside Gov. Pete Ricketts, Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert, the Lancaster and Douglas county attorneys and others.
They voiced concerns about a pair of criminal justice bills that received first-round approval earlier this week and repeated concerns about a bill to repeal the death penalty, which gained first-round approval Thursday from a majority of the Legislature.
Ricketts vowed to veto any death-penalty repeal that reaches his desk.
But the news conference took particular aim at an effort by the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee to restore indeterminate sentencing, known as the “one-third rule,” which would require judges to set a minimum sentence at a number of years not greater than one-third of the maximum sentence.
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The committee unanimously advanced a bill (LB483) on Wednesday that would restore the one-third rule for all felony crimes except those for which the maximum sentence is life. And similar language is amended onto one of the reform bills (LB605) approved by lawmakers this week.
Supporters say restoring the one-third rule would help ease crowding in Nebraska prisons, which are at 159 percent of capacity.
“This one-third rule is not a proposal to reduce prison overcrowding,” Peterson said Thursday, instead calling it something “from the ACLU playbook.”
The bill was introduced by Lincoln Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks. It didn’t come from the ACLU, although the group supports it, said Danielle Conrad, executive director of ACLU of Nebraska.
Pansing Brooks said the idea came from criminal defense attorneys and is intended to give inmates more incentives to get behavioral and other help before leaving prison.
“I am blown away that they don’t like this,” she said.
Peterson claimed prosecutors and other public safety officials aren’t being given a seat at the table to talk about criminal sentencing, saying they are the most qualified people to address the issue.
“Having hearings and being out in the lobby is not enough,” he said.
That's the same level of input anyone else gets, said Lincoln Sen. Adam Morfeld, a Judiciary Committee member.
"The attorney general seems to forget that the Legislature creates the law, and they enforce the law, but they seem determined to want to do both," Morfeld said in an email.
Peterson also took issue with recent comments made by Omaha Sen. Bob Krist. During debate on the reform bills this week, Krist gestured to the Capitol lobby, where prosecutors were watching, and referred to it as “Disney World.”
“These senators are not taking our gang problem seriously,” Mayor Stothert said Thursday.
Krist said his comment described the scene in the Capitol Rotunda earlier in the week, when various state and county attorneys appeared to stand in stations while meeting with individual lawmakers. Many of the prosecutors didn’t seem familiar with the various criminal justice studies the Legislature has completed recently, Krist said, calling their lobbying efforts “a distraction.”
“It was like an amusement park,” he said. “You could just pick where you wanted to go and be entertained by whoever. … I don’t do this because I need to be entertained by people who don’t know the subject matter.”
Scott Frakes, the state’s new prisons director, should be finished doing his own examination of the correctional system this fall, Ricketts said. Lawmakers should wait until then to act and not “jump in without thinking” on prison reform, he said.
And he blamed “management problems” for the prison system’s issues and for the state’s inability to obtain the drugs required to carry out a lethal injection under current law.
Ricketts wouldn’t say whether building a new prison is on the table for Frakes.
“I don’t believe building a new prison at this point is going to solve any problems,” Ricketts said.
Reach the writer at 402-473-7234 or zpluhacek@journalstar.com. On Twitter @zachamiLJS. Reporter JoAnne Young contributed to this story.