Column: Nebraska should eliminate death penalty

Heidi Hochstetler
Staff Writer
April 29, 2004, Page 6

Earlier this year, the Nebraska State Legislature voted to put off a decision about whether to switch Nebraska’s method of execution from the electric chair to lethal injection.
They were asking the wrong question.
The real question is whether the state should allow capital punishment at all.The United States is the only industrialized western nation that still uses capital punishment.
In 2000, according to Amnesty International, “88 percent of all known executions took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the USA.” Iran is not usually a nation with which we group ourselves, ideologically speaking.
In the 1976 case Gregg V. Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld the revised death statute in Georgia.
Since then, 38 states, including Nebraska, have remodeled their death statutes based on Georgia’s. Twelve states and the District of Columbia do not have active death penalty statutes.
However, several factors still render capital punishment unfair, impractical and problematic.
Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, coauthors of “Who Owns Death?” describe the process of deciding who receives the death penalty as “highly random.” Conviction and application of the death penalty is often influenced by the defendant’s race, class and the quality of defense lawyers.
A law that discriminates against racial minorities and the poor cannot be constitutional.
According to Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty, in 82 percent of studies reviewed nationwide, the race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty. Nationwide, about 90 percent of death row inmates could not afford to hire a lawyer when they were tried.
Another popular theory about the death penalty is that it acts as a deterrent for potential criminals. Real life, however, seems to work differently from theory.
One study on Texas executions between 1984 and 1997 concluded that the number of executions was unrelated to either murder rates or felony crimes, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Finally, capital punishment is a sentence that cannot be righted if a mistake is made. In the last 200 years, Nebraska has executed 43 men.
Of those men, one was certainly innocent, since his “victim” was discovered to be alive four years later, according to NADP. Evidence exists that another executed man may have also been innocent.
Lethal injection, while becoming the preferred method, is a particularly disturbing form of execution. Our society is already numbed to violence.
We shouldn’t further anesthetize ourselves by allowing government-sanctioned killing.