Should a man who beat his 67-year-old widow neighbor to death with a tent pole be spared from execution because of legal concerns over lethal injection?

Those questions are at the heart of a heated Eighth Amendment constitutional debate about cruel and unusual punishment raging in Ohio. And the debate is spilling over onto the national scene.

"I think it's rather absurd to say it's cruel and a violation of the Eighth Amendment when an execution involves getting a needle inserted," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a California victims-rights organization.

"Cruel and unusual punishment referred to drawing and quartering and the rack," he said, referring to punishments in old English law.

Nevertheless, Gov. Ted Strickland granted temporary reprieves yesterday to two inmates scheduled for execution in a month or so. He pushed Thursday's scheduled execution of Lawrence Reynolds, 43, of Akron, to March 9, 2010, and moved the Nov. 10 execution of Darryl Durr of Cleveland to April 20.

Reynolds was convicted of murdering Loretta Foster, a 67-year-old neighbor, on Jan. 1, 1994. Earlier yesterday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Thursday's execution.

Durr, 46, was sentenced to die for abducting, raping and using a dog chain to choke to death 16-year-old Angel O'Nan of Elyria on Jan. 31, 1988.

The postponements are directly related to problems during the failed execution of Romell Broom of Cleveland on Sept. 15. Prison emergency medical technicians at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville struggled unsuccessfully for two hours to attach IV lines before Strickland called off the execution.

Based on a subsequent appeal by Broom's attorneys, a federal judge set a hearing in the case for Nov. 30. Broom, 53, now has no execution date as his penalty for abducting, raping and stabbing to death 14-year-old Tryna Middleton on Sept. 21, 1984.

The delays leave many people, including some Dispatch readers, angry and frustrated. A sampling of comments from the newspaper's Web site.

• I'm constantly amazed at all the sympathy for these cold-blooded KILLERS when there is almost none for their VICTIMS. Doesn't anybody get it? These people deserve to die.

• Why are we showing any sympathy to a killer? Let's either hang him, give him the electric chair or draw and quarter him -- anything to get him off the taxpayers dole.

• Can't you people drop your bloodthirstiness for a while to see that the Constitution is properly applied?

Ohio is one of 35 states with the death penalty; the vast majority of states rely on lethal injection as the sole or primary method of execution. Of 1,175 executions in the past 32 years, 1,004 were by injection.

Four states still have the electric chair as an option (Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Virginia), while the gas chamber still can be used in limited cases in Arizona, California, Maryland and Missouri. New Hampshire and Washington allow hanging but haven't used it in many years, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.

Dieter said he doesn't think anyone is seriously suggesting a return to the electric chair, such as Ohio's "Old Sparky," because lethal injection is considered more humane.

"The death penalty is constitutional, but the means of carrying it out still have the limit of cruel and unusual punishment," Dieter said. "There's got to be some constitutional limit."

"The electric chair is dead," victims-advocate Scheidegger agreed. "But I do think it was a mistake to get rid of the gas chamber. They should just use another form of gas."

Megan McCracken, an Eighth Amendment expert working with the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, said the courts have ruled that the constitutional ban on certain kinds of punishment has evolved over time.

"The punishment is death, the loss of life. It's not they will be tortured to death, or they will experience pain and suffering," she said.

ajohnson@dispatch.com