We all know that life is full of unintended consequences, but I had that reality brought home to me in a serious way yesterday.  It happened as a result of a conversation I had with my client on death row in Alabama.  As a result of the call, I had the assignment of checking to see if Alabama was moving forward with bringing back the electric chair.

It turns out that it is-- that the Alabama House of Representatives just passed a bill reintroducing the electric chair as a method of execution.

Anyone who follows the Supreme Court's docket with an eye towards cases involving the right to life knows that the Court took a case on lethal injection earlier this year.  Obviously there is a chance, the odds of which no one knows, that the Court will hold that the use of lethal injection violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "cruel and unusual" punishments, thus outlawing that method of execution.

One might suggest that result would be a very good thing and that it would show we are moving in the right direction on this aspect of the right to life debate.  Remarkably last week all the leading Catholic publications in the U.S.-- including both the National Catholic Reporter and the National Catholic Register (which disagree on almost everything)--  published a common editorial calling for the abolition of the death penalty.

The Vatican weighed in as well, joining in the call for the death penalty to be outlawed.

But the culture of death obviously won't go quietly and, in a display of "I'll show you" the Alabam House of Representatives responded to the possibility that lethal injection would  be outlawed by voting last Friday to bring back something even more gruesome-- the electric chair. So, if that thinking prevails in Alabama, the victims of executions could be spared the inhumane treatment of lethal injection only to be literally roasted to death with electric current.

I can't imagine that people who were happy when the Supreme Court took up the lethal injection case thought for a minute that the result of that case-- assuming lethal injection is outlawed-- would be a return of the electric chair, with its own history of horrible executions.  But there you go-- the operation of unintended consequences.

Hopefully the Aalbama Senate  will see things differently and the bill reinstituting the electric chair will not become law.  But if it does, perhaps there will be further unintended consequences and the prospect of state-sponsored death by electrocution will generate some of the same revulsion we currently reserve for the beheadings performed by ISIS (which are much more "humane" than the depictions of the consequences of the electric chair).

And if we think Alabama is the only place where these sort of unintended consequences have sprung up, you should know that Utah is working on reintroducing the firing squad as a means of execution, just in case.

Just shows you we still have work to do.