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Schroeder, 40, will join the 11 men already on Nebraska's death row.

“May he rot in the gates of hell. He's a gutless good-for-nothing," said John James of Bennet, grandfather of Terry Berry, whom Schroeder strangled in his cell at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution on April 15, 2017.

James quietly shook his fist in satisfaction after the death sentence was announced. Schroeder also received 45 to 50 years in prison for using a weapon to commit a felony.

Later, James said he blames the state for putting his grandson, convicted of forgery, in the same cell as Schroeder, who was serving a life sentence for killing 75-year-old Pawnee City farmer Kenny Albers.

“That is stupid. That is plain stupid,� James said of the two sharing a cell.

Before announcing the death sentence Friday, presiding Judge Vicky Johnson of Wilber asked the attorneys if they had any final words. When they declined, she turned to Schroeder.

“Anything you want to tell me?� she asked him.

He answered no.

Johnson said the panel did not consider the fact that Schroeder “expressly welcomes a death sentence.�

"It is the law, and not the defendant’s wishes, that compels this panel’s ultimate conclusion,� she said. "Mr. Berry's murder was disturbing in its own right and especially cruel," particularly because he was two weeks from his release and Schroeder knew it.

She said while it is in Schroeder’s favor that he saved Berry’s family from having to go through a trial and the county from the expense of a trial, those factors don’t outweigh the aggravating circumstance.

Judges Johnson, Robert Otte of Lincoln and John Marsh of Kearney heard evidence in April on aggravators.

Prosecutors alleged just one needed to make the case eligible for the death penalty — that he had previously been convicted of another murder — and Schroeder, who represented himself, chose not to fight the death penalty and made no argument or case for why the judges shouldn’t give it to him.

He admitted to strangling 22-year-old Berry because he wouldn’t stop talking.

Berry had been moved into Schroeder's cell almost a week earlier. Schroeder said he knew it wasn’t going to work, but he said prison staff just laughed when he asked for Berry to be moved out of his cell.

In the sentencing order, the judges found that there was no evidence Schroeder had asked for Berry to be moved or told officials Berry was in mortal danger if they didn't move him.

And after, he joked to a guard about watching wrestling and the murder.

At the time, Schroeder was in prison on a life sentence for beating Albers with a nightstick during a robbery in 2006 and dumping him, still alive, into an abandoned well. Albers died there.

Last year, Schroeder's case brought renewed questions and scrutiny from state senators and prisoner advocates alike who saw the killing as yet another failure of a prison system beset by one problem after another. Many asked how Berry had come to share a cell with Schroeder.

At Schroeder’s plea hearing, Assistant Nebraska Attorney General Doug Warner said Schroeder and Berry had shared cell No. 16 in a segregation unit at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution from April 10 to April 15, the night a corrections officer doing normal checks came by and Schroeder said there was “something he needed to get out of his cell.�

Berry was lying unconscious on the floor with a towel around his neck.

He was taken to a Lincoln hospital, where he died five days later.

An autopsy confirmed he'd been strangled to death, something Schroeder himself told an investigator, Warner said.

Schroeder's sentencing came nearly a year to the date that Nikko Jenkins became the 11th inmate on the state's death row.

On May 30, 2017, he was sentenced for a killing spree in Omaha in 2013, beginning just 11 days after his release from prison. Jenkins shot and killed Juan Uribe-Pena and Jorge Cajiga-Ruizo, then Curtis Bradford, then Andrea Kruger, all within 10 days.

This summer could see Nebraska's first execution in more than 20 years, if state prosecutors get their way.

Last week, Attorney General Doug Peterson asked the Nebraska Supreme Court to speed up its decision on issuing a death warrant for Carey Dean Moore, because one of the state's four lethal injection drugs will expire at the end of August.

Moore, 60, was sentenced to death on two counts of first-degree murder in Douglas County in the 1979 deaths of two Omaha cab drivers Reuel Van Ness Jr. and Maynard Helgeland. He has been on death row 38 years.

Nebraska's other death row inmates