Lincoln, Neb. ? The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Friday that electrocution is cruel and unusual punishment, outlawing the electric chair in the only state that still used it as its sole means of execution.

The state’s death penalty remains on the books, but the court said the Legislature must approve another method to use it. The evidence shows that electrocution inflicts “intense pain and agonizing suffering,” the court said.

“Condemned prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes,” Judge William Connolly wrote in the 6-1 opinion.

“Contrary to the State’s argument, there is abundant evidence that prisoners sometimes will retain enough brain functioning to consciously suffer the torture high-voltage electric current inflicts on a human body,” Connolly wrote.

The first execution by electrocution was in 1890 in New York, and it quickly became the dominant means of capital punishment across the country. Today lethal injection is the preferred method in most states.

There are conflicting views on whether federal courts might agree to hear an appeal. Attorney General Jon Bruning said he will ask the state court to reconsider its decision, and his spokeswoman, Leah Bucco-White, said, “We’re exploring all our options.”

Gov. Dave Heineman’s spokeswoman, Jen Rae Hein, said he is considering introducing a bill this legislative session to replace electrocution with lethal injection.

“I am appalled by the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision,” Heineman said in a statement. “Once again, this activist court has ignored its own precedent and the precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court to continue its assault on the Nebraska death penalty.”

The high court made the ruling in the case of Raymond Mata Jr., convicted for the 1999 killing and dismemberment of 3-year-old Adam Gomez, of Scottsbluff, the son of his former girlfriend.

Investigators testified that parts of the toddler’s body were found at Mata’s home in a freezer, a dog bowl and dog-food bag. Human bone fragments also were recovered from the stomach of Mata’s dog.

Nebraska Solicitor General J. Kirk Brown had argued for the state that the legal standard a method of execution must meet is to minimize the risk of unnecessary pain, violence and mutilation, not eliminate it. He said electrocution meets that test.

But the high court said electrocution “has proven itself to be a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein” than a state prison.

Jerry Soucie, Mata’s attorney, said he was “really surprised the lengths they went to lay out in detail what’s wrong with electrocution.”

Nebraska’s last execution was in 1997. Ten inmates are on the state’s death row; one of them, Carey Dean Moore, was to have been electrocuted in May but the state Supreme Court stopped it less than a week before his scheduled date because of the case it ruled on Friday.

The state changed its method last year to one 20-second jolt of 2,450 volts, instead of four shorter shocks.

The court stressed that its ruling did not strike down the death penalty – just electrocution as the method.

Last year, a state bill to repeal the death penalty failed after first-round debate by just one vote. Bills must go through three rounds before they get final approval.

Legal experts said it doesn’t make sense for Nebraska to rush to establish a new method of execution.