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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.

Lincoln Journal Star

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State needs another method to execute its worst criminals

MCCOOK No one can accuse Hollywood of being unbiased, but it's hard to argue that execution by electric chair, as depicted in the film "The Green Mile," is anything but cruel. And, because Nebraska was the only state with the electric chair as its sole means of execution, the Nebraska Supreme Court had no trouble in a 6-1 decision Friday defining it as both cruel and unusual and therefore unconstitutional. ...

The lone dissident, Chief Justice Mike Heavican, said he felt that because the Nebraska Constitution does not exactly mirror the U.S. Constitution, the decision might be overturned by a higher court. "In other words, the majority relied upon those aspects of federal law that supported its conclusion and ignored the remainder that did not."

But before the electric chair, or any other means of execution, is dismissed as "a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein than the death chamber," we must compare the penalty to the crime.

The court's ruling came in the case of Raymond Mata Jr., convicted for the 1999 kidnapping and killing of a 3-year-old Scottsbluff boy, whose dismembered body was found in Mata's freezer and in the stomach of Mata's dog.

Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood cited the 2002 Norfolk bank murders, when "three gunmen entered a local bank and destroyed the lives of five families in less than a minute." Those three robbers are among the 10 on death row. ...

Yes, the electric chair probably is cruel. And, the other choice, lethal injection, is under fire for the alleged suffering for those put to death by the most common three-drug "cocktail."

But we, and the majority of Nebraskans, believe it's appropriate for the state to have the option of imposing the ultimate penalty in the most heinous examples of murder, such as the Scottsbluff or Norfolk cases.

It's crucial, however, that the state demonstrate an improved ability to impose it competently and fairly, as well as its reluctance to use the ultimate penalty in all except the most abhorrent of crimes.