The electric chair debate

Wow!

Let's bring the electric chair to McCook, the method of punishment finally ruled as "cruel and unusual" by the Nebraska State Supreme Court, the last state to abolish its use, on February 8, 2008.

That means it was deemed as a cruel and unusual way to take a convicted felons life by all the states in the U.S. except Nebraska; the state that abolished it last.

I know what many of you are thinking; that there's no such thing as cruel and unusual punishment for those people who have been judged by a jury as guilty in the taking of another person's life. The problem with our criminal justice system is that we sometimes convict the wrong people of the crimes they're accused of.

If we do that and we find out later that our system made a mistake; if they're later discovered by due process of law that they didn't commit the crime they were convicted of, we can at least let them go. When we kill them, we can't. The death penalty is absolute and unyielding. When we kill someone in the state's name of justice and retribution, there's no taking it back. And the electric chair has been determined by most states as being the most grievous, painful, punishing way of dying that has ever been state sanctioned.

Don't take this the wrong way. Because of my past life as a Tulsa police officer, I have never been soft on crime. I believe that those people who actively and intentionally prey on others should be dealt with immediately and severely. There's no soft spot at all in my heart for the "bad guys" that screw up the lives of other people; sometimes permanently. But I also choose to believe that we live in a civilized society that no longer "does it to others because they did it to you." If you and I really believed that, most of us would be involved in acts of retribution because of the wrongs that have been imposed on us.

But we don't.

So I was amazed at the front page story in Tuesday's edition of the McCook Daily Gazette that my long time friend, Duane Tappe, has proposed that the state give McCook the electric chair for the purpose of tourism.

I met Duane soon after I moved to McCook and I've always considered him to be a friend but I think this time he's just wrong. The United States remains one of the few countries in the western world that continues to kill people; the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth mantra," and the electric chair has been universally condemned as the most brutal way possible of taking another person's life.

I'm not sure how one compares traveling to Kansas to see the world's largest ball of twine to recommending that we petition and actively solicit the state to have the most hellish form of execution known to modern man be sent to McCook so that we can "attract" more tourists to our fair city.

I wonder what kind of tourists they might be.

And to suggest that bringing the electric chair to McCook would "honor" Sen. George Norris, the force behind the Rural Electrification Act which brought electric service to rural areas across the county, is perhaps the biggest stretch of all.

I doubt this is what he had in mind.

I think we're better than that. And if housing the state's electric chair in the fair city of McCook is the best idea we can come up with to promote tourism, maybe we're even more intellectually bankrupt than we thought we were.