The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that electrocution is cruel and unusual punishment, outlawing the electric chair in the only US state that still used it as its sole means of execution.
The state's death penalty remains on the books, but the court said on Friday that state lawmakers must approve another method to use it. The evidence shows that electrocution inflicts "intense pain and agonizing 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," Connolly wrote.
The first 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 backup.
There are conflicting views on whether federal courts might agree to hear an appeal. Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning said he will ask the state court to reconsider its decision, and his spokeswoman Leah Bucco-White said, "We're exploring all our options."
"I am appalled by the Nebraska Supreme Court's decision," Nebraska Governor Dave 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," he said.
Heineman's spokeswoman Jen Rae Hein said that he is considering introducing a bill this legislative session to replace electrocution with lethal injection.
Past attempts to replace electrocution with lethal injection, however, have failed.
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 of Scottsbluff, the son of his former girlfriend.
Nebraska Solicitor General Kirk Brown had argued for the state that the legal standard a method of execution must meet is to minimize the risk of unnecessary pain, violence and mutilation, not eliminate it. He said electrocution meets 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.
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