by the Omaha World-Herald

About the author: The following viewpoint was published as a staff editorial in the Omaha World-Herald, a prominent midwestern newspaper.

[In January 1997] John Gregory Dunne wrote perceptively in The New Yorker magazine about an underclass of young people in southeastern Nebraska who worked in dead-end jobs or not at all, living mostly to party on evenings and weekends.

They would earn a few dollars, get drunk and sometimes turn to petty crime. Dunne found them when he was in Nebraska to tell the story of the slaying of Teena Brandon and two companions in a farmhouse near Humboldt, for which one young man now sits on death row and another is serving a life term in prison.

At the center of the story was alcohol. The two men were drunk when...