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A small group of Nebraska lawmakers launched a filibuster Wednesday against a bill that would enhance the penalties that alleged drug dealers could face for providing substances linked to overdoses.

Initially introduced by former Sen. Suzanne Geist but taken up this year by her successor, Sen. Carolyn Bosn of Lincoln, the bill (LB137) would increase the potential prison sentence dealers might face if drugs they're accused of distributing kill or seriously injure a drug user.

The Legislature's Judiciary Committee advanced the bill to the full body Tuesday on a 5-2 vote, with Sen. Wendy DeBoer of Bennington joining Bosn and the committee's three other conservative lawmakers to push the bill onto the floor.

The bill initially called for some dealers to be sentenced to 20 years to life in prisonÌý— putting the crime on the same plane asÌýsecond-degree murder in Nebraska's criminal code. But theÌýcommittee added an amendment that would cap a dealer's potential prison sentence at 50 years.

"We have lost too many young people in this stateÌý— and middle-aged people, quite franklyÌý— to a death resulting from use of a controlled substance that is so much more dangerous than any of the controlled substances out there," Bosn said Wednesday, targeting fentanyl and other synthetic between January 2018 and November 2022.

"We can attack this from every angle simultaneously and I've done just that," she said. "So this is not just Sen. Bosn coming in and wanting to enhance a penalty and put more people in jail. That couldn't be further from the truth."

Bosn, a former prosecutor who was appointed to the Legislature midway through last year's contentious session following Geist's resignation, pointed to her support for drug courts andÌýa bill the body advanced in January that would give sterile needles to drug users to reduce the spread of infectious disease, among other measures, to tackle "the fentanyl crisis."

"This war will not be fought on my bill alone," she said Wednesday, which marked the 31st day of 2024's 60-day legislative session. "We have got to come at this with every tool in the toolbox."

But a group of urban lawmakers — including Sens. Machaela Cavanaugh, Justin Wayne and Terrell McKinney of Omaha joined by Sen. George Dungan of Lincoln — repeatedly lined up to speak out against Bosn's bill on the legislative floor Wednesday, while some members of the group filed motions and amendments, signaling the start of a filibuster.

Cavanaugh, who engaged in a monthslong filibuster last year over objections to a measure the Legislature ultimately passed restricting access to gender care for transgender youths, filed a motion to indefinitely postpone Bosn's proposal — but said she didn't intend to filibuster it.Ìý

The Omaha senator said she opposed the penalty enhancements outlined in Bosn's bill, casting them as an ineffective tool to administer criminal justice and address broader opioid use.

"I don't think that it's going to deter crime," said Cavanaugh, whose comments were echoed by Dungan, a former public defender. "And if we really want to deter crime we need to get to the root causes of crime and focus our energy on the root causes of crime."

But, she said, "it does appear (Bosn) has the votes that would break a filibuster, so to that end, I'm not going to take eight hours, because it's gonna end in the same result of moving the bill forward regardless."

Her colleagues from Omaha made no such promises, though.

McKinney and WayneÌý— the chairman of the Judiciary Committee who indicated he would continue to stall a vote on Bosn's billÌý— both repeatedly cautioned Wednesday that Bosn's bill would bring unintended consequences to the state's judicial system and mark the Legislature's latest contribution to the overcrowding plaguing Nebraska's prisons.

"It's easy to get behind what we would deem tough-on-crime bills," Wayne said. "It's easy to say that there is a drug problem and we have to be harder on drug dealers. I don't disagree with those statements. The problem is this bill is too broad."

Wayne said prosecutors in the state are already capable of charging reckless drug dealers with manslaughter if the substances they deliver result in fatal overdoses.

And he noted that fatal or serious injury overdoses can be litigated in federal court, where one of the state's most infamous overdose cases went after a former Nebraska State Patrol evidence technician and her then-boyfriend stole pounds of cocaine and fentanyl from the patrol's evidence storage facility and sold a mixture of the drugs, leading to a string of local overdoses.

Wayne also took issue with the language in Bosn's bill that would allow prosecutors to deploy the penalty enhancement in cases where an alleged drug dealer's supply was "connected with" an overdose, suggesting it could broaden the pool of defendants eligible to face the enhancement.

He cast the proposal as "overly broad" and suggested prosecutors would use itÌý— stacked with additional felony chargesÌý—Ìýagainst defendants whom Bosn isn't intending to crack down on.

"We are going to actually punish people for not knowing something's in there," said Wayne, a practicing criminal defense attorney. "That goes against the fundamental aspects of criminal law: that they have to know what they're doing."

McKinney, meanwhile, pinned his opposition to the bill on the impact it will have on Nebraska's prison system, pointing to the measure's , in which the Department of Correctional Services noted the bill "could increase the length of stay of persons in prison, thereby increasing the overall prison population."

He also highlighted released in January that blamed overcrowding in Nebraska'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.

"If my calculations are right, the United States of America and the state of Nebraska has probably been trying to be tough on crime for 30-plus years," McKinney said. "I would ask you: Has that worked? Has that approach worked? Has the punitive approach to addressing crime worked?

"Honestly, ask yourself, has it worked? Because if it worked, I don't believe we would beÌý— this state would beÌý— building a $350 million new prison if being tough on crime actually worked."

The fledgling filibuster took the Legislature to lunch Wednesday without a vote on Cavanaugh's motion to postpone the bill, which will come before a vote on the proposal itself.

Lawmakers are scheduled to restart debate on the bill at 9 a.m. Thursday.