The death penalty.

Its issues are thorny, often filled with emotion instead of logic.

But the Nebraska Board of Pardons seems to be ignoring both emotion and logic in its decisions regarding a convicted murderer.

Last week, the Nebraska Supreme Court stayed the execution of Randolph Reeves, a 42-year-old man who stabbed to death two young women in 1982.

Reeves is an American Indian who was adopted into a Quaker family. The two women he killed were both Quakers, and the murders took place in a Quaker meeting house.

Reeves was convicted and sentenced to death by electric chair.

But ever since his sentencing, relatives of the victims and leaders of the Quaker church nationwide have been lobbying to have his sentence commuted because they are adamant in their belief that the death penalty is wrong.

Reeves’ supporters managed to convince the Supreme Court to stay the execution, but not before losing to the Board of Pardons, which rejected the Quakers’ request for commutation.

Relatives of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing were allowed to plead before a jury that Timothy McVeigh should receive the death penalty.

If the state allows and places great stock in pleas in favor of execution, why does it refuse to heed pleas opposed to the death penalty?

Truthfully, the judicial system would probably be better served by ignoring all pleas from relatives and simply fitting the punishment to the crime.

However, the courts do allow testimony from relatives of victims, and in some capital cases, such as the Timothy McVeigh trial, they even solicit it to prove the great losses sustained by the victims’ friends and families.

Since McVeigh was sentenced on the strength and number of his victims’ relatives, wouldn’t it make sense to commute Reeves’ sentence based on the strength and numbers of those relatives opposed to his execution?

The death penalty is obviously a difficult issue which invokes strong emotions on both sides of the political spectrum.

It is almost never clear-cut as to who should die and who should be allowed to live.

But when even parents and children of murder victims so desperately want to keep a killer from being killed, shouldn’t the court grant them their wish?