Editorial

Death penalty is appropriate, within limits

Saturday, February 9, 2008

No one can accuse Hollywood of being unbiased, but it's hard to argue that execution by electric chair, as depicted in the film "The Green Mile," is anything but cruel.

And, since Nebraska is the only state with the electric chair as its sole means of execution, the Nebraska Supreme Court had no trouble in a 6-1 decision Friday defining it as both cruel and unusual and therefore unconstitutional.

"Contrary to the State's argument, there is abundant evidence that prisoners sometimes will retain enough brain function to consciously suffer the torture high voltage electric current inflicts on a human body," Judge William Connolly wrote in the majority opinion. "The evidence supports the district court's statement that instantaneous and irreversible brain death is a myth."

Gov. Dave Heineman said he was "appalled" by the decision, calling it the ruling of an "activist court" ignoring its own precedent and that set by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The lone dissident, Chief Justice Mike Heavican, said he felt that because the Nebraska Constitution does not exactly mirror the U.S. Constitution, the decision might be overturned by a higher court. "In other words, the majority relied upon those aspects of federal law that supported its conclusion and ignored the remainder that did not."

But before the electric chair, or any other means of execution, is dismissed as "a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein than the death chamber," we must compare the penalty to the crime.

The court's ruling came in the case of Raymond Mata Jr., convicted for the 1999 kidnapping and killing of a 3-year-old Scottsbluff boy, whose dismembered body was found in Mata's freezer and in the stomach of Mata's dog.

Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood cited the 2002 Norfolk bank murders, when "three gunmen entered a local bank and destroyed the lives of five families in less than a minute." Those three robbers are among the 10 on death row. Flood vowed to work to reinstate the death penalty.

Yes, the electric chair probably is cruel. And, the other choice, lethal injection, is under fire for the alleged suffering for those put to death by the most common three-drug "cocktail."

But we, and the majority of Nebraskans, believe it's appropriate for the state to have the option of imposing the ultimate penalty in the most heinous examples of murder, such as the Scottsbluff or Norfolk cases.

It's crucial, however, that the state demonstrate an improved ability to impose it competently and fairly, as well as its reluctance to use the ultimate penalty in all except the most abhorrent of crimes.

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