By NATE JENKINS

Associated Press Writer

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- Nebraska officials have obtained advice from execution experts in Kentucky and Texas on a protocol to carry out the state's new lethal-injection law, and say they could have a proposal by this fall.

"We've been moving this with haste because we knew that we wanted these procedures developed" as soon as possible," said Robert Houston, director of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.

In May, Nebraska lawmakers and Gov. Dave Heineman approved legislation making lethal injection the means of executing the state's condemned killers. It replaces electrocution, which the state Supreme Court in February 2008 ruled was cruel and unusual punishment.

Nebraska was the only state with electrocution as its sole means of execution, and while the lethal-injection law goes into effect Sept. 1, executions can't be carried out until a protocol is developed. Experts have said they don't expect an execution in Nebraska for several years; the last execution in the state was in 1997.

There are 11 people on Nebraska's death row.

The procedure being developed will specify the drugs used to kill and the sequence in which they will be administered, among other things.

It is expected to be similar to the Kentucky protocol, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

Two of the U.S. Supreme Court's nine justices disagreed with the majority but said if Kentucky's lethal injection procedure contained safeguards to ensure inmates were unconscious before they're killed - such as calling out the inmate's name or shaking him - they would have found it constitutional.

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning has recommended those concerns be addressed in any injection protocol Nebraska might adopt.

"A lot of what we do will be similar" to the Kentucky protocol, Houston said Monday. "I can't say at this point it will be duplicative."

Unlike in some other states where the execution procedures are kept secret, Nebraska's will be formally considered for approval through a series of public hearings.

A final proposal will be reviewed by the attorney general and the governor for final approval.

Death-penalty opponents have criticized the state for having a lethal-injection law but lacking a protocol to implement it. In a motion filed with the state Supreme Court less than a week after lethal injection was approved in May, the attorney whose court challenge led to the scrapping of the electric chair argued that lawmakers couldn't delegate the job of devising a protocol to the executive branch.

But the state Supreme Court refused to consider the motion filed by Jerry Soucie on behalf of death-row inmate Raymond Mata Jr.

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