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The Legislature ultimately voted 35-2 to advance the bill (LB137) after a small group of lawmakers spent hours Wednesday and Thursday urging their colleagues to oppose the measure championed by Sen. Carolyn Bosn of Lincoln, casting it as an overly broad and ineffective approach to respond to drug overdoses.

If made law, the bill would increase the potential prison sentence dealers might face if drugs they're accused of distributing kill or seriously injure a drug user, allowing for a prison sentence of up to 50 years.

Omaha Sens. Justin Wayne and Terrell McKinney led a group of urban lawmakersÌýwho repeatedly lined up toÌýspeak out against Bosn's bill, which was initially introduced last year by former Sen. Suzanne Geist of Lincoln, whom Bosn replaced after Geist resigned from the LegislatureÌýin April.

Wayne repeatedly grilled Bosn, a former prosecutor, on the "overly broad" language in the proposal, which he suggested could be seized upon by prosecutorsÌýto target defendants Bosn wasn't intending to crack down on.

After hours of debate Thursday morning, Wayne and Bosn agreed to add an amendment to the bill to make clear that the enhancedÌýpenaltiesÌýcould only be deployed against defendants who supplied drugs that "directly and proximately caused" the death or serious injury of a drug user.

The Legislature adopted Wayne's amendment on a 40-0 vote and, shortly after, voted to advance the bill from the first of three rounds of debate.

McKinney and Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh of Omaha were the only two lawmakers to vote against the bill's advancement, while Wayne and others who had opposed the legislationÌý— including Sens. Danielle Conrad and George Dungan of LincolnÌý— opted not to vote at all.

It had been clear since Wednesday morning that Bosn's bill had ample support to survive a potential filibusterÌýin Nebraska's formally nonpartisan, 49-member unicameral Legislature. And a bid to indefinitely postponeÌýthe bill failed on a 36-8 vote halfway through Thursday's three-hour morning session.

But the group of urban lawmakers spent hours railing against the proposal anyway, pointing to prior penalty enhancements that have left Nebraska's prison system among the most overcrowded in the country.

"Instead of learning those lessons from our sister states, we have before us efforts to double down on bad policy, to perpetuateÌýa war on drugs and to look tough on crime," Conrad said. "Enhanced penalties and additional penaltiesÌýdon't get after the root of the problem."

Bosn, meanwhile, said the proposal was among a series of steps the Legislature could and should take this year to combatÌýdrug overdoses, specifically those involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, between January 2018 and November 2022.

"We have a responsibility," she said. "This is our exact job. Picking license plates, doing all those thingsÌý— we do that, too. This is our obligation. This is why people send you here. This is why they vote. Respond to the crises that we're facing."

Bosn, too, questioned her colleagues over why opposition against her bill had "become partisan," particularly after the conservative-dominated Legislature hadÌýadvanced a bill in January that would give sterile needles to drug users to reduce the spread of infectious disease.

"This is a bill that every single person in here on both sides of the aisle should be saying, 'Heck yes. Let's attack this problem,'" she said. "I cannot think of another example where we have lost hundreds of children and people in our state and we have turned around and said, 'You know, we justÌý— we aren't the people to make that decision on how to fix that problem. We don't really want to get involved with that.'

"Hundreds of people are dying and we are sitting here saying, 'This might not be the solution that we need.'"

The bill's detractorsÌý— all of whom are registered DemocratsÌý—Ìýinsisted that their opposition stemmed not from their political party, but from genuine concerns with the potential impact of the legislation.

Cavanaugh said she was "displeased and offended" by Bosn's implication, calling penalty enhancements "bad policies" and warning her colleagues to "not start throwing mud at each other."

Wayne agreed with Bosn's assessment that lawmakers were sent to the Capitol to pass "sound bills," suggesting LB137 didn't qualify.

He noted that the case that prompted the proposal — the November 2021 overdose death ofÌýTaryn Griffith,Ìýa 24-year-old Sarpy County woman who died after unknowingly takingÌýa fentanyl-laced tablet at a Lincoln club — would not have ended any differently had Bosn's bill been law.

Sen. Barry DeKay of Niobrara read a letter amid Thursday's debate from Griffth's parents, who told lawmakers that the state "cannot continue to punish drug dealers and distributors with barely a slap on the wrist," calling for a mandatory minimum sentence and a change to how police handle overdose investigations.

Bosn's bill creates an enhancement with no mandatory minimum that can be added to felony drug delivery charges.

But the Lancaster County Attorney's Office never filed charges inÌýGriffith's overdoseÌý— meaning there's no defendant to face the enhanced penalty created by the bill.

"We're reacting to a situation, but we're not actually addressing the situation that we're trying to react to," Wayne said. "We're creating a bill, a new enhancement penalty, that doesn't solve the problem of the individuals who brought the bill. If we're gonna pass legislation to fix problems, let's actually fix the problem."

If the bill is made law, its passage would mark the Legislature's latest step to increase potential sentence lengths for criminal defendants in Nebraska.

An academic report released in JanuaryÌýblamed overcrowding in the state's prisons on lawmakers who, both broadly and incrementally, have increased minimum sentence lengths for a host of crimes over the past two decades, manufacturing the overcrowding crisis the state faces now.

Part of the prison population's increase passed by the Legislature in 2009 in response to an epidemic of gang violence in Omaha’s inner city.

The Legislature passed seven laws between 2015 and 2018 that brought increased penalties for pandering, prostitution, human or labor trafficking, assaulting police officers and sexually assaulting or sexually contacting students, in some cases making felonies out of former misdemeanors.

And lawmakers have created new offenses for threatening someone via text or email, distributing a private image of another person and grooming while defining health care officials as peace officers, making it a felony to strike them, too.

As his colleagues considered Bosn's bill Thursday, McKinney said it would ultimately add to the prison system's crowding problem, pointing to the measure's , in which the Department of Correctional Services said the bill "could increase the length of stay of persons in prison, thereby increasing the overall prison population."

He questioned why the Legislature would advance a criminal penalty enhancement after the body created a sentencing reform task force last year.

"This is jumping the gun. But y'all don't care, because you've got the votes and you can do what you want," said McKinney, who said that he would resign from the sentencing task force if the Legislature passed Bosn's bill, minutes before 35 senators voted to advance it.