LINCOLN, Neb.—Condemned Nebraska inmate David Dunster is making his third appeal to the state Supreme Court, asking that his conviction and death sentence be overturned.
Dunster has been in prison since he was 17 years old, when he killed a mother of eight in Oregon. He was transferred to a Montana prison in 1978, where he later killed an inmate.
In 1993, he asked to be transferred to the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln, where he killed Larry Witt of Grand Island.
He fired his court-appointed attorneys twice, pleaded guilty and begged for a judge to sentence him to death.
“It is really a pain in the ass to get you people to kill me,” he said at the time.
Now 54, Dunster argues that it was the ineffective counsel of a “merry-go-round of lawyers” from the Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office that caused him to plead guilty.
If not for errors by his trial counsel, “he would not have entered a plea of guilty, nor would he have been passive during the penalty phase,” Lincoln attorney Peter Blakeslee wrote in Dunster’s appeal.
The state said Dunster has already had plenty of chances to make that case and called Dunster’s third appeal “yet another delaying tactic.”
“Most if not all of Dunster’s constitutional arguments are duplications-in-whole of arguments previously urged upon this court,” write J. Kirk Brown, Nebraska solicitor general.
The court will hear arguments in the case Friday.
“Delay is the constant friend and goal of a death-sentenced prisoner,” Brown writes. “Every day that enforcement of a valid death sentence is delayed, is a day the death-sentenced prisoner escapes his or her rightful punishment.”
Dunster came close to the electric chair in 2001, when the state Supreme Court issued a stay of execution just over two weeks before he was scheduled to be put to death.
Dunster argued then, and now, that he was under the influence of prescription medication when he pleaded guilty to killing Witt. He said his court-appointed attorneys repeatedly ignored his requests to obtain medical records or have him tested for mental illness.
Either way, he won’t face death in Nebraska’s electric chair. The court last year ruled that electrocution amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The state still has a death penalty but no way of putting condemned inmates to death.
A bill to change the state’s method of execution to lethal injection is stuck in a legislative committee.
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