Posted on 07/28/2006 9:38:13 AM PDT by new yorker 77
The state Supreme Court on Friday rejected an inmate's appeal that the electric chair amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, leaving Nebraska as still the only state with electrocution as its sole means of execution.
No American court has ever ruled that electrocution amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. But as legal challenges were mounted against its use, others states adopted alternative methods of execution, primarily lethal injection.
"Nebraska ... now is alone in the United States, actually in the whole world, in still requiring electrocution," Carey Dean Moore's lawyer, Alan Peterson, argued to the court. "Nebraska is the last holdout for this universally rejected and condemned sole means of capital punishment."
In its ruling, the court noted that Moore was previously rejected in his bid to have the electric chair deemed cruel and unusual punishment. The court said it "need not entertain a second or successive motions for similar relief on behalf of the same prisoner."
Under state law, Moore also had to persuade justices to throw out his death sentence in order to win his appeal. He was sentenced to death for the 1979 murders of two Omaha cab drivers.
Peterson did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, nine states allow some or all condemned inmates to choose between lethal injection and another execution method. Ten states have the electric chair but only Nebraska uses it exclusively.
Some inmates choose execution of lethal injection, which has recently spurred several legal challenges over whether the drugs used actually prevent pain. Last week in Virginia, Brandon Hedrick, 27, chose to become the first person in the U.S. to die in the electric chair in more than two years.
Moore's appeal was based on a change in execution protocol made by the state in 2004. Prison officials used one continuous jolt of electricity for 15 seconds instead of four separate jolts after a judge said the practice appeared to cause undue suffering.
Three people have been put to death in Nebraska since executions were resumed in 1994.
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It's the popcorn thing.
Endorsed by Charlie Starkweather...
This bozo needs to ride the lightening.
I kinda like the idea of death by flamethrower.
How about public beheadings as an alternative!
Not quite so "universal", since I wholeheartedly endorse it!
Perhaps his "client" should have thought of this before committing his crime(s).
Where's the problem???
Harold Lamont "Walkin' Willie" Otey -- executed Sept. 3, 1994 for the rape and murder of 26-year-old Jane McManus. Otey got away with less than 50 dollars and a tape deck, which was later instrumental in tying him back to the McManus murder. Apologists mourned Otey's death sentence because they claimed he had been rehabilitated and wrote poetry. Sentenced June, 1978, Otey spent more than 17 years on Death Row.
John Joubert -- executed July 17, 1996 for the murders of 11-year-old Ricky Stetson of Black Cove, Maine; 13-year-old Danny Jo Eberle, a Bellevue paperboy; and 12-year-old Chris Walden, who was nearly decapitated by Joubert's knife. Sentenced in January, 1984, Joubert outlived his victims by more than a decade.
Robert E. Williams -- executed Dec. 2, 1997 for two counts of first-degree murder. Williams was sentenced in 1978 for the murders of two Lincoln women and the sexual assault of one. He lived almost 20 years on Death Row, and filed multiple appeals, several of which were summarily dismissed as "frivolous."
Any chance they will make a double seater???
Although slightly less PC than the rest of the country, Nebraska still yields to the handwringers and the rest of the Sympathy for the Devil crowd. Getting these vermin exterminated takes an act of God, and every time it happens, there is a renewed outcry from the boo-hoo chorus.
We need to get like Texas and start running 'em through Sparky like cattle through a squeeze chute.
And asking at the same time: Original or Extra Crisp?
The solution, of course, is to not murder anyone. But if you really feel the need, do it in some state such as Maryland, where you will never be executed or if you are, you will be dying of old age at the time.
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