Death row prisoners in the United States are saying they can't take it anymore and asking to die. Behind that trend is the reality of their living conditions - typically more than a decade of mind-numbing isolation under the specter of death with years of legal wrangling ending in dashed hopes and execution. If serial killer Michael Ross is executed this week in Connecticut as planned, he will join more than a hundred "volunteers" who have waived appeals and hastened their deaths since capital punishment was reinstated a generation ago.
Tough-on-crime prison conditions and an ever-longer appeals process make dropping the legal fight attractive, experts say.
"The day-to-day experience becomes pretty unbearable," said Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who told a hearing in April that Ross' living conditions influenced his choice to die.
Of the 59 people executed in 2004, 10 had dropped appeals.
Like inmates on death row across America, Ross is locked up most of the day in a small cell with no access to prison sports or education programs, and no interaction with other inmates.
In an essay posted on the Internet by the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Ross describes his sliver of a window as offering "a wonderful view of the razor-wire fencing and outdoor recreation yard of the prison next door."
Ross, who admitted killing eight women and raping most of them, was sentenced to death in 1987. He first asked to waive his appeals over a decade ago.
"There is so little to focus on. There is so little over which individuals have control. There's so little to distract them from the negative thoughts," said Grassian.
CHANGING THEIR MINDS: Of the 963 people executed in the last three decades, one in eight asked for their appeals to be dropped. But last year, the rate rose to one in six. In Florida alone, eight of the last 12 executions were people who ended their legal fight.
Those who have ended appeals include the youngest, a 22-year-old killer in Oklahoma; the first, Gary Gilmore, executed by firing squad in Utah in 1977, and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
OTHERS BACK OUT:
"A lot of people volunteer and then change their minds," said Richard Dieter, who heads the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. "It's a back-and-forth situation."
One is a second death row inmate in Connecticut, Sedrick Cobb, who recently said he too wanted to end his appeals. "It's just the right time," he wrote in a note to a judge.
Cobb, convicted of raping and killing a woman he kidnapped in 1989, volunteered once before and changed his mind.
Another Connecticut death row inmate, Daniel Webb, raised the issue in a letter to the Hartford Courant newspaper.
"Is there any wonder why Ross, ... Cobb and perhaps even myself all want to give up our appeals and die?" he wrote. "What's the alternative, continued existence like this?"
Dropping appeals tends to be contagious, experts say.
"One volunteer begets another," wrote legal expert John Blume in an academic paper called "Killing the Willing: 'Volunteers,' Suicide and Competency." He said Texas once executed four volunteers in eight months and Florida executed two in a week.
Underlying the numbers is debate over whether inmates convicted of horrific crimes should be allowed to decide to die.
"When he, Michael Ross, or any other defendant is controlling the situation, that is not really the way it's supposed to work," said Dieter.
Grassian argues that death row conditions leave inmates incapable of making good decisions, and that Ross is making a desperate ploy for attention.
"It's 'I can't stand it any longer, I'm trapped, it's hopeless and I'm going to go down in a blaze of glory,'" the psychiatrist said.
Some volunteers are considered suicides, including Gilmore, who was executed just two months after his sentencing, and serial killer Ted Bundy, who told police he committed murders in Florida because the state had the death penalty.
Comments
Comments are closed.