"When a Killer Wants to Die"

The latest issue of Time magazine has an article on "Death-Row Volunteers."  (The article focuses on the case in Connecticut of Michael Ross).  Here is an excerpt:

A sentence of death and a killer ready to die would seem a perfect partnership. With condemned inmates around the country spending an average of 10 years wading through appeals, both the state and the convict can get impatient. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, almost 12% of all U.S. executions have been of so-called volunteers, murderers who plead guilty and ask for death or, more commonly, waive their appeals. As death houses around the country begin to crowd with volunteers, however, their presence raises questions about whether a justice system can be fair when it is distorted by demands from the condemned.

In a climate of growing unease over the death penalty--New York's legislature rejected it last week, a month after the Supreme Court ruled against juvenile executions--the volunteers don't please either side of the debate. For the tough-on-crime crowd, they raise the unsettling possibility that for some criminals death may not be the ultimate punishment. The judicial establishment is more comfortable executing convicts when the appeals process has been lawfully exhausted so the state doesn't appear bloodthirsty. For their part, death-penalty opponents say volunteers are really victims, too brutalized by life on death row to know what they're doing. And in some cases, volunteers have reintroduced executions in parts of the country that had long resisted carrying them out.

For my own views on the subject, see this essay.

Rick