As our lawmakers convene for a special session to address the issues of reinstating the death penalty in Nebraska and changing the mode of execution from electrocution to lethal injection, we should ask them to consider the guillotine. Seriously. 

Now that Nebraska is the only state whose manner of execution is electrocution, our kind of death penalty is in danger of being considered cruel and unusual. The singularity of our manner of state killing would now make it undeniably unusual. As for "cruel," proponants of lethal injection argue that killing by injection would be "more humane." 

But if the aim is a kinder, gentler manner of execution, the better choice would be the guillotine. Physiologists tell us that the quickest and least painful way of killing a human being is the instant severing of the spinal cord delivered by the swift blade of the guillotine. The chop of an ax and the use of rope and trapdoor can achieve the same result, but these procedures can be easily botched; indeed the guillotine was introduced in France precisely to avoid such botchings. 

If the mention of the guillotine here in the third millennium sounds outrageous, maybe that is because merely thinking about it confronts us with the reality of what we are doing when we kill a person as a form of punishment. Lethal injection, on the other hand, masks what we are doing by wrapping the act in the trappings of health care--people dressed up like doctors and nurses, the procedure of injection (even, I am told, including the irony of disinfecting the skin to protect the person about to be executed!). Lethal injection is, I submit,  a physical euphemism, an obscenity really. 

Please tell your state senator that you don't want to be party to such a masquerade. This is why I would urge them at least to consider the guillotine. It clears the mind, and helps one see that abolishing the death penalty altogether, substituting life in prison without parole, is the best course of action. 

Rev. Dennis Hamm, S.J. 
Omaha