US: Nebraska outlaws 'Frankenstein' electric chair

Nebraska’s supreme court has ruled that electrocution is cruel and unusual punishment, outlawing the electric chair in the only US state still using it as a sole means of execution.

The state’s death penalty remains on the books, but the court said state legislators must approve another method.

Evidence showed that electrocution inflicted “intense pain and agonising suffering”, the court said.

“Condemned prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes,” Judge William Connolly wrote in the 6-1 opinion.

“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.”

The first execution by electrocution was in 1890 in New York, and it quickly became the dominant means of capital punishment across the US.

Today lethal injection is the preferred method in most states, and the nine states that still allow electrocution use it only as an option or back-up.

There are conflicting views on whether US courts might agree to hear an appeal. Attorney general Jon Bruning said he would ask the state court to reconsider its decision and his spokeswoman, Leah Bucco-White said, “We’re exploring all our options.”

Jen Rae Hein, spokeswoman for Nebraska’s governor Dave Heineman, said he was considering introducing a bill this legislative session to replace electrocution with lethal injection.

“I am appalled by the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision,” Mr Heineman said in a statement.

“Once again, this activist court has ignored its own precedent and the precedent set by the US Supreme Court to continue its assault on the Nebraska death penalty.”

The high court made the ruling in the case of Raymond Mata, convicted for the 1999 killing and dismemberment of three-year-old Adam Gomez, the son of his former girlfriend.

Investigators said parts of the toddler’s body were found at Mata’s home in a freezer, a dog bowl and dog-food bag. Human bone fragments also were recovered from the stomach of Mata’s dog.

Nebraska solicitor general Kirk Brown had argued for the state that the legal standard a method of execution must meet was to minimise the risk of unnecessary pain, violence and mutilation, not eliminate it. He said electrocution met that test.

But the high court said electrocution “has proven itself to be a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein” than a state prison.

Nebraska’s last execution was in 1997. Ten inmates are on the state’s death row; one of them, Carey Moore, was to have been electrocuted in May but the state supreme court stopped it less than a week before the scheduled date because of the pending case it has just ruled on.

The state changed its method last year to one 20-second jolt of 2,450 volts, instead of four shorter shocks.

The court stressed that its ruling did not strike down the death penalty – just electrocution as the method. Approving another method, however, could prove difficult.

Past attempts to replace electrocution with lethal injection in Nebraska have failed, largely due to the efforts of the legislature’s staunchest opponent of capital punishment, Senator Ernie Chambers of Omaha.

Chambers pointed out today that a bill to replace execution would have to be approved by the Judiciary Committee, but that was unlikely, given that on Thursday the committee sent to the full legislature a bill that would repeal the death penalty.

“It would be stupid and a waste of time and strictly for political purposes to introduce a bill to replace electrocution with lethal injection,” Senator Chambers said.