Editorial #2 Final Draft

Nebraska Death Penalty

The Nebraska death penalty has recently come into question in the state unicameral. Electrocution was the sole method until the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled the method unconstitutional in February 2008. Nebraska tried to pass a life sentence without parole to replace the death penalty but it fell one vote short of passing. The death penalty is wrong and should be replaced with a life sentence without out parole.
The death penalty is cruel punishment. There are reports of botched deaths when it comes to any form of execution. The last reported case of an electrocution gone badly was July 8, 1999 in Florida. Blood had poured from the mouth of the man being executed and oozed through the buckle holes on the straps across his chest. There are a number of cases more resent then that where lethal injection has gone wrong. The problems reported with lethal injection is not being able to find a vein, going through the vain and the poison being pumped into the surrounding tissue, and unusual violent reactions to the lethal drugs. Even if you could guarantee that you could use lethal injection without harm to a person, killing someone is still wrong.
The death penalty is wrong because you may execute an innocent person. The death penalty is also a long and complicated process. It clogs up the courts and cost millions of dollars. This long process also causes prolonged pain for the victim’s family, who must relive the trauma through multiple court hearings and appeals. If there were a way to guarantee that no one innocent would be killed, if the cost of the death penalty were cheaper then life without parole, and if the death penalty helped the victims families, taking the life of another is still wrong.
The most compelling reason for revoking the death penalty, and replacing it with life without parole, is that to kill another human being is wrong. Most death penalty cases involve the defendant being charged with murder. We cannot claim that murder is wrong when we turn around and kill someone who is convicted of murder. We are all human and none of us have the right to say that because it is a jury, judge, or law (which were written by man) that means it is acceptable to kill the killer. No one has the right to judge who should live and who should die, that is why there are laws against murder. We should not look the other way when someone is being killed, even if it is the authorities that are making that choice.
Fourteen states do not have the death penalty. Nebraska needs to adopt this practice, too. We were the last state to have electrocution as our sole method of capital punishment. Let us become one of the early adaptors of life with out parole. We all have a responsibility to do what is morally just. Choosing to let the state murder someone is no more just then letting anyone else get away with it. We need to let our state know that we do not support the death penalty; that it is wrong and we will not stand to let any more blood be spilled, even when the blood is not that of an innocent person.