Friday's Nebraska Supreme Court decision leaves the state without a means of carrying out the death penalty. The time is ripe to abolish capital punishment in the state.
Posted: Saturday, February 9, 2008 6:00 pm
Friday’s Nebraska Supreme Court decision leaves the state without a means of carrying out the death penalty.
The time is ripe to abolish capital punishment in the state.
Sen. Ernie Chambers’ bill, LB1063, would allow two sentences for first-degree murder: life in prison or life in prison without the possibility of parole. The measure failed by just one vote last year.
With the advent of more DNA testing, errors in sending people to death row were shown to be far more frequent than most people believed.
Nationally, scores of people — including some on death row — have been cleared of their crimes. Some who were released on the basis of DNA testing were completely exonerated and actually were innocent.
The justice system isn’t perfect. That has been proved in the past and will be proved in the future.
Nebraskans are sharply split over the death penalty, with 51 percent in a 2007 Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty poll favoring repeal if accompanied by a sentence of life without parole and restitution to the victim’s estate.
Gov. Dave Heineman has said he would veto Chambers’ bill, which would take 30 votes in the Legislature to overcome.
That’s a steep order, but state senators need to consider what means of the death penalty would be viable.
Nebraska was the only state using the electric chair as the sole means of execution, and now its high court has ruled that method to be cruel and unusual punishment.
“Contrary to the state’s argument, there is abundant evidence that prisoners sometimes will retain enough brain functioning to consciously suffer the torture high voltage electric current inflicts on a human body,” Judge William Connolly wrote in the opinion for the court. “The evidence supports the district court’s statement that instantaneous and irreversible brain death is a myth.”
No doubt. Remember Florida, where one person being electrocuted bled from the nose and two others had flames shooting from their heads?
Photos of Allen Lee Davis’ execution in 1999 show what happened as the switch was thrown.
According to a New York Times article, his face contorted and turned a bright purple, blood pouring from his nose. He was still alive when the power was turned off, witnesses reported, his chest rising and falling about 10 times before he was still.
Lethal injection has the same problem. The U.S. Supreme Court now is considering whether the most common drugs used to kill by lethal injection violate the Constitution.
Recent executions in Florida and Ohio using lethal injection took much longer than usual, with strong indications prisoners suffered severe pain in the process, The Associated Press reported.
The three-drug cocktail has appeared to cause some inmates to suffocate while conscious and paralyzed instead of stopping their hearts while they were knocked out, a report in the medical journal PLoS Medicine said.
“There is no humane way of forcibly killing someone,” editors of the journal wrote.
Instead of rushing to pass a new means of capital punishment, the Legislature should take this opportunity to finally get rid of the death penalty.