Execution to be videotaped

A Maryland prisoner awaiting a gas-chamber execution has agreed to have his death videotaped so that a fellow inmate can argue that the method constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, Reuter reports from New York. The National Law Journal reports that a federal judge in Baltimore has approved the videotaping along with the monitoring of the inmate's brain by electroencephalograph, which measures electrical forces. Cruel and unusual punishment is barred, but not defined, under the Constitution's Eighth Amendment.