Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Virginia's governor wasted no time in restarting his state's execution machine once the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that injecting inmates with a three-drug lethal cocktail does not violate the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Texas will soon follow suit.

The ruling was a disappointment but not a surprise, given the court's philosophical makeup.

We note, however, that Justice John Paul Stevens, long a death penalty supporter, quoted a 1972 Supreme Court opinion that called the ultimate punishment a "pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes."

Our opposition to the death penalty is long-standing, but until the Texas Legislature abolishes it - which isn't likely in the foreseeable future - we urge that it be imposed fairly and as humanely as possible. There is no honor to be found in turning the state into the same ruthless killer it says it is executing every time a condemned inmate is strapped to a gurney.

We have noted in the past that Texas' lethal injection cocktail is not scientifically derived and is administered in a dose that does not take into account an inmate's size or physical condition. We have also noted that state law prohibits veterinarians from using pancuronium bromide - one of the drugs that makes up the execution cocktail - to euthanize animals because of its potential to cause unnecessary pain and suffering.

Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed the appellant's complaints that the Kentucky procedure - essentially the same as the one used in Texas - may be painful.

"Simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or as an inescapable consequence of death, does not establish the sort of objectively intolerable risk of harm that qualifies as cruel and unusual," Roberts wrote.

The decision's focus was narrow: whether the method of execution passes constitutional muster. We now have an answer to that, but Stevens raises questions that should be considered in the future about just what society accomplishes when it kills.

It was neither a clean nor a satisfactory ruling, but it should be enough balm on the consciences of death penalty proponents who are claiming a significant victory. It is, but one haunted by Stevens' questions and others associated with the death penalty.

The death penalty is not applied evenly. Texas criminal defendants have a greater chance of facing the death penalty in Harris County than in Travis County for the same offense. And, certainly, defendants in Texas have a higher chance of facing execution than criminal defendants in any other state.

Those issues, obviously, will have to be taken up another day. They should be.