Currently on Death Row

• Carey Dean Moore: Sentenced for the murder of two Omaha cabdrivers in 1979.
• Michael Ryan: Sentenced for the brutal torture and murder of three members of his religious cult on a farm outside of Rulo, Nebraska in 1985.
• John Lotter: Sentenced for the December 1993 murders of Teena Brandon, Lisa Lambert and Philip Devinein Humbolt in December 1993. His accomplice, Nissen receive a life-sentence in return for his testimony against Lotter.
• David Dunster: Sentenced for killing his cell mate, Jerry Witt, in 1997 while serving a sentence in Nebraska for two previous killings; a 1972 rape and murder of an Oregon woman and the 1979 killing of a fellow cell mate. He plead guilty to the murder of Witt and fired his public defender to take control of his own case. He has made it known that he wants to commit "suicide by state." In a letter to the judge he stated, "I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a prison cell, having already spent 27 years. The only other alternative is the death penalty, which I am demanding. The death sentence is my only way out of this madness! It's my parole and pardon all in one." He was serving his prison sentences at the Nebraska State Penitentiary because of an inmate swap that later drew criticism from a state ombudsman. Dunster decided he wanted to kill someone at the penitentiary and selected Witt as his victim.
• Raymond Mata Jr.: Sentenced in 2000 for killing and dismembering Adam Gomez, his girlfriend's young son, in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
• Arthur Lee Gales Jr.: Given two death sentences in November 2001 for two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder for the Nov. 12, 2000 deaths of Latara and Tramar Chandler and the beating of their mother, 36-year-old Judy Chandler. On November 5, 2002 the Nebraska Supreme Court will hear arguments that the Ring decision by the US Supreme Court vacated Gales' death sentence and therefore Gales' sentence should be vacated and replaced with two life terms.
• Jeffrey Hessler: Hessler raped and killed 15-year-old Heather Guerrero execution style after he kidnapped her at the end of her paper route. Her body was found in the basement of an abandoned home. After he was arrested for the Guerrerro case, Hessler was convicted of raping another papergirl in a nearby city six months earlier. Hessler had confessed to authorities that he killed Guerrero to silence her about the sexual assault. During trial Hessler said the two had consensual sex and the shooting was a mistake. Hessler dismissed his attorneys before the sentencing phase of his trial and he submitted a statement to the court saying he deserved to die and he asked for a death sentence.
• Jose Sandoval: One of four men convicted of killing 5 people in a U.S. Bank branch in Norfolk, NE on Sept. 26, 2002.
• Jorge Galindo: One of four men convicted of killing 5 people in a U.S. Bank branch in Norfolk, NE on Sept. 26, 2002.

Formerly on Nebraska's Death Row*

• In 1999 Jerry Simpson and Clarence Victor were taken off of Nebraska's death row due to a law passed in 1998 that prohibits the execution of people with IQ scores of less than 70.
• On January 7, 2000 the Nebraska Supreme Court vacated the death sentence of Randy Reeves stating that the 1991 Nebraska Supreme Court had acted unconstitutionally when it substituted itself for a three judge sentencing panel. Reeves had been sentenced to death for the drug induced murder of Janet Mesner and Victoria Lamm in Lincoln on March 29, 1980. On September 7th, 2001 Lancaster County Attorney Gary Lacey announced that he would not seek the death penalty at Reeves' re-sentencing hearing. Reeves was sentenced to two life terms on September 18th 2001. He publicly thanked the people who comforted his family as well as the families of his two victims in the years since the killings.
• On June 13, 2001 Jeremy Sheets was released after prosecutors decided not to retry his case. Sheets had been sentenced to death for the September 23, 1992 kidnaping and murder of Kenyatta Bush. The Nebraska Supreme Court overturned Sheets' 1997 conviction in 2000. It ruled that prosecutors should not have been allowed to use their key piece of evidence - a taped confession by Adam Barnett in which Barnett said that he and Sheets kidnapped, raped and killed Bush because she was black. Barnett hanged himself in jail after giving the statement and before Sheets' trial started, so Sheets was unable to confront his accuser, the state court ruled. On Monday May 14, 2001 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the state court's decision.
• On July 1, 2001 Roger Bjorklund was found unresponsive in his cell and was later pronounced dead at a Lincoln hospital. It has been stated Bjorklund died "not of natural causes," but this mysterious statement has not yet been further explained.
  
• On August 3rd, 2001 Peter Hochstein and Michael Anderson had their sentences commuted to life in prison when the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that Nebraska law prohibits the impositions of sentences of death based on non-unanimous determinations of three judge sentencing panels. Anderson and Hochstein were sentenced to death for the 1975 murder-for-hire of Omaha real estate businessman Abboud. They were re-sentenced to death in 1999 by a non unanimous three judge panel after the U.S. Supreme Court found their original death sentence flawed.
• Charles Jess Palmer: Sentenced for the 1979 murder of a Mr. Zimmerman in Grand Island. Palmer died on death row of natural causes in the Summer of 2006.
  

* Many more men have been removed from Nebraska's death row. This list includes only those men removed from death row between 1999 and 2006.

Execution History

• Executions were staved off until Harold Lamont "Wili" Otey was executed in 1994.
• John Joubert was executed in 1996.
• Robert Williams was executed December 2, 1997.