A punishment that has always been cruel is now cruel and unusual. Nebraska is the only death penalty State that offers no method of execution other than electrocution. Carey Dean Moore was spared that fate yesterday when the Nebraska Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of the State's plan to use a lethal surge of electricity to end his life.

State Supreme Court Judge John Gerrard wrote that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions "at least raised the question whether electrocution is constitutional."

"Our constitutional responsibility to decide whether electrocution is lawful requires us to consider whether any convicted person should be electrocuted ...," Gerrard wrote.

The state's abandoned protocol called for a series of shocks, a prolonged process more consistent with torture than a humane approach to execution. Nebraska's new protocol, the one that the court will review, calls for a single jolt of electricity that, while massive, may not suffice to kill.

Under the protocol announced Wednesday, officials would wait 18 minutes to determine whether an inmate is dead and administer a second jolt if the heart is still beating.

And so the inmate, having miraculously survived a figurative lightning bolt, must wait 18 minutes before a second shock ends his life. By what definition is this not cruel?