Electric chair outlawed

The ruling was made in the case of a man who killed a 3-year-old boy and fed the body parts to a dog.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Friday that electrocution is cruel and unusual punishment, outlawing the electric chair in the only state that still used it as its sole means of execution.

The state’s death penalty remains on the books, but the court said the Legislature 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 court stressed that its ruling did not strike down the death penalty — just electrocution as the method. 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, Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha.

Chambers pointed out Friday that a bill to replace execution would have to be approved by the Judiciary Committee. That’s unlikely, he said, given that on Thursday the committee sent to the full Legislature a bill that would repeal the death penalty.

The high court made the ruling in the case of Raymond Mata Jr., convicted for the 1999 killing and dismemberment of 3-year-old Adam Gomez of Scottsbluff, the son of his former girlfriend.

Investigators testified that 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 J. 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.