Nebraska Supreme Court strikes down electrocution

NEW YORK – The electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The decision effectively suspended executions there because Nebraska is the only state that still relies solely on electrocution, which was once the dominant form of execution in the United States.

"The evidence here shows that electrocution inflicts intense pain and agonizing suffering," Justice William M. Connolly wrote for the majority in a 6-to-1 decision.

The state’s attorney general, Jon Bruning, said he would "move to the legislative process to get a new method of execution." Working on a clean slate, Nebraska may choose a form of lethal injection that does not rely on the combination of three chemicals that is the subject of a pending challenge in the US Supreme Court. Indeed, it may explore entirely different methods of execution.

Seven states allow at least some inmates to choose electrocution instead of lethal injection. Two other states, Illinois and Oklahoma, have designated electrocution as the fallback method should lethal injection be ruled unconstitutional.

While yesterday’s ruling is not binding outside Nebraska, some legal experts said courts may now be reluctant to allow condemned inmates to choose electrocution in states where that is an option.

"It’s essentially being relegated to a museum," said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization based in Washington.

Indeed, Dieter added, the decision may cause Nebraska and perhaps other states to reconsider current methods of execution. Nebraska has executed only three prisoners since 1976, the last one in 1997.

In the case pending before the US Supreme Court, Baze v. Rees, lawyers for the inmates have said that using the single drug common in veterinary euthanasia would avoid what they called the possibility of excruciating pain inherent in the three-chemical combination.

The US Supreme Court has never held a method of execution to be unconstitutional, and in 1890 it appeared to say that electrocutions do not violate the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. In the Baze case, the court is considering the standard to be used in assessing the constitutionality of the three chemicals used in lethal injections.

The challenge in Nebraska was brought by Raymond Mata Jr., who was convicted in 2000 of kidnapping and murdering Adam Gomez, the 3-year-old son of a former girlfriend. Mata dismembered the boy’s body, and human bone fragments were found in the stomach of Mata’s dog.

"We recognize the temptation to make the prisoner suffer, just as the prisoner made an innocent victim suffer," Connolly wrote. "But it is the hallmark of a civilized society that we punish cruelty without practicing it. Condemned prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes."

The decision did not affect Mata’s death sentence. "Although it cannot be implemented under current law," Connolly wrote of the sentence, it "remains valid."

The court held that electrocutions are unconstitutional under Nebraska’s state constitution. The provision it relied on uses the same language concerning cruel and unusual punishment as the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution.

In the 1890 decision, the US Supreme Court said that "punishments are cruel when they involve torture or a lingering death," suggesting that electrocutions do not cross that line.

In 1993, three justices questioned the continuing validity of that ruling, in a statement issued when the Supreme Court declined to hear an Eighth Amendment challenge to electrocutions. Justice David H. Souter, joined by justices Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, wrote that the court had "not spoken squarely" on the question since 1890 and that "modern knowledge" might require a different result.

Electrocution became the most common form of execution by the middle of the last century, displacing hangings. But no state has adopted electrocution since 1949. Lethal gas was briefly popular, and lethal injection, now the almost universal method of execution, was introduced in 1977.