Supreme Court Won't Hear Challenge To Lethal Injection Law
Rejects appeal from condemned child killer Mata
June 19, 2009
Statehouse observers had presumed, or at least speculated, that the Nebraska Supreme Court would pass judgment on the new lethal injection law through an appeal from condemned child killer Raymond Mata Jr.
Not so.
The high court entered an order June 17 saying it would not hear Mata’s challenge of the statute which was enacted by the 2009 Legislature.
In 2008 the Supreme Court declared Nebraska’s use of the electric chair to be unconstitutional. That decision came in a ruling on Mata’s case.
The Legislature adopted lethal injection as the state’s method for killing condemned killers. The new law is certain to be challenged on a variety of grounds as appeals from death-row inmates continue.
In its ruling this week, the Supreme Court said that for a variety of procedural reasons it no longer had jurisdiction to hear Mata’s appeal.
Mata has twice been sentenced to death for the grisly 1999 murder of 3-year-old Adam Gomez. The toddler was the child of Mata’s former girlfriend, Pamela Gomez.
The child’s body was dismembered. Police found the skull hidden in the ceiling of the room where Mata stayed. Other body parts were recovered from a freezer. Bone fragments were taken from the stomach of Mata’s dog.
Mata was tried and sentenced to death in 2000.
A landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on sentencing convicted killers then required that Mata be re-sentenced on the murder conviction. Mata’s life sentence for kidnapping the child was not affected by the decision.
The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that juries must participate in sentencing. Nebraska law was changed to have jurors decide whether someone convicted of first-degree murder should be eligible for the death penalty. Sentencing is then handled by the trial judge or, at the judge’s request, a panel including that judge and two other district court judges.
A jury in Keith County concluded in 2005 that Mata was eligible for the death penalty.
The second death sentence was handed down by District Judges Robert Hippe, who presided over the trial in Keith County; John Samson of Blair and Robert Steinke of Columbus.
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