A Nebraska court won’t consider a death row inmate’s appeal raising questions about the state’s new lethal injection method and how the drugs needed for it were obtained.
Cult leader Michael Ryan was sentenced to death for the torture death of one of his followers, and the beating death of the 5-year old son of another cult member.
The Nebraska Supreme Court on Thursday put on hold the execution of a death row inmate condemned to die for two 1985 cult-related slayings at a farm near Rulo.
The cult leader’s defense attorney had argued in part that Michael W. Ryan could not be executed by lethal injection because he was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
The Nebraska Attorney General’s Office has asked the State Supreme Court to reject a request by death row inmate Michael Ryan to put his pending execution on hold.
Ryan, the leader of a cult-like White Supremacist survivalist group, sentenced to death in September 1985 after he was convicted in the murders of two members of the group, including a 5-year-old boy.
The Nebraska attorney general’s office has asked the state Supreme Court Thursday to schedule an execution date for former cult leader Michael Ryan, who was condemned for the torture and slaying of a man in 1985 at Ryan’s compound near Rulo.
Ryan’s execution would be the first in Nebraska since 1997 and its first by lethal injection.
Timothy Haverkamp, convicted of second-degree murder in 1985 for his role in the cult-related murder of two people near Rulo, is one of several inmates working at the mansion under a decades-old arrangement with the state’s work release program, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Connie Nemec said.
Interviews with the authorities, relatives of the Rulo farm’s residents and neighbors create a picture of weapon stockpiles, religious fanaticism and anti-Government sentiment. The farm’s recent residents have been linked by the authorities and family members to an anti-Semitic, white supremacist religious movement, the Ministry of Christ Church, which is called Identity after its publication, and to an allied group, the radically antitax, anti-Government Posse Comitatus.