Negotiations over Nebraska legal justice reform fail to yield compromise | Politics

LINCOLN — Days of negotiations between state lawmakers, the governor and others did not yield any consensus on methods to sluggish Nebraska’s fastest-in-the-nation jail progress.

That was clear throughout debate Tuesday on a invoice to implement the suggestions and concepts that got here out of a joint research of the state’s legal justice system by the Legislature, Gov. Pete Ricketts and the state’s court docket system.

Within the preliminary debate final week over Legislative Invoice 920, senators had been sharply divided over provisions of the invoice that would cut back some legal penalties. State Sen. Suzanne Geist of Lincoln, who like Ricketts strongly opposed these provisions, launched an modification to strip them out of the invoice.

In response, Speaker of the Legislature Mike Hilgers had brokered talks previously week in an effort to interrupt the logjam.

These conferences included Ricketts and quite a few senators, together with Omaha Sens. Steve Lathrop, Terrell McKinney and John Cavanaugh. It additionally included quite a few representatives of the legal justice system, together with Douglas County Lawyer Don Kleine, Douglas County Public Defender Tom Riley and Aaron Hanson, former president of the Omaha police union.

However regardless of some preliminary promise, the talks ended Monday with none settlement.

“We tried,” Hilgers mentioned in an interview. “You’ve obtained some folks that have some vital philosophical variations on methods to type of remedy a few of these issues. I don’t know if they’re solvable with the time we’ve remaining.”

That was evident within the sharp division within the Legislature on Tuesday.

Lathrop, sponsor of LB 920, mentioned the modification Geist was providing would strip away the components of the invoice that may make any significant affect on the trajectory of the state’s jail inhabitants.

They included provisions to cut back penalties for possession of a small quantity of medicine, get rid of obligatory minimal sentences for some drug offenses, set up standards for judges to find out when sentences for a number of crimes needs to be served consecutively, decrease the penalty for burglaries that don’t contain breaking into a private dwelling, and require that these sentenced as recurring criminals beneath the state’s “three strikes” regulation to have beforehand dedicated violent offenses.

A World-Herald evaluation earlier this 12 months discovered Nebraska’s jail system is the quickest rising and most overcrowded in the USA. It’s additionally among the many nation’s most racially unequal.

Lathrop famous that beneath present projections, the state’s prisons would add a further 1,300 inmates by 2030. That will imply needing to construct one more jail on high of the $270 million, 1,500-bed jail that Ricketts has been pushing.

“It’s not one jail, it’s two, and it’s not $270 million, it’s nearer to $500 million,” Lathrop mentioned.

An evaluation by the Crime and Justice Institute, a nonprofit that facilitated the Nebraska justice reinvestment course of final 12 months, estimated LB 920 as launched by Lathrop would largely flatten Nebraska’s present inmate progress, decreasing Nebraska’s 2030 jail headcount by 1,000 from the present projections. An evaluation of Geist’s modification indicated it might lower present projections by lower than 150 inmates.

Geist mentioned her modification was centered on 15 provisions that got here out of final 12 months’s legal justice research that obtained consensus help from the group. She mentioned she was notably seeking to protect parts of LB 920 that may improve remedy and programming for inmates, serving to them keep away from reoffending and returning to jail.

“Do I believe we should always lock them up and throw away the important thing? Completely not,” mentioned Geist, who had additionally served on the legal justice research panel. “However I’m not for reducing penalties and having our judges change their sentencing.”

Debate on the invoice was anticipated to proceed Wednesday.