Time on Death Row

The length of time prisoners spend on death row in the United States before their executions has recently emerged as a topic of interest in the debate about the death penalty. The discussion increased around the execution of Michael Ross, a Connecticut inmate who had been on death row for 17 years, and has been spurred by the writings of two Supreme Court Justices who have urged the Court to consider this issue.

Death row inmates in the U.S. typically spend over a decade awaiting execution. Some prisoners have been on death row for well over 20 years.

During this time, they are generally isolated from other prisoners, excluded from prison educational and employment programs, and sharply restricted in terms of visitation and exercise, spending as much as 23 hours a day alone in their cells.

This raises the question of whether death row prisoners are receiving two distinct punishments: the death sentence itself, and the years of living in conditions tantamount to solitary confinement – a severe form of punishment that may be used only for very limited periods for general-population prisoners.

Moreover, unlike general-population prisoners, even in solitary confinement, death-row inmates live in a state of constant uncertainty over when they will be executed. For some death row inmates, this isolation and anxiety results in a sharp deterioration in their mental status.

DEATH ROW SYNDROME/DEATH ROW PHENOMENON

Psychologists and lawyers in the United States and elsewhere have argued that protracted periods in the confines of death row can make inmates suicidal, delusional and insane. Some have referred to the living conditions on death row – the bleak isolation and years of uncertainty as to time of execution – as the “death row phenomenon,” and the psychological effects that can result as “death row syndrome.” The origins of these concepts are often traced to the 1989 extradition hearings of Jens Soering, a German citizen who was charged with murders in Virginia in 1985 and who fled to the United Kingdom.

Soering argued to the European Court of Human Rights that the conditions he would face during the lengthy period between sentencing and execution would be as psychologically damaging as torture.

The court agreed. In its ruling that he could not be sent to a place that would sentence him to death, the court cited not the death penalty itself, but rather the “Death Row phenomenon” by which convicts spent years awaiting execution while their cases were appealed. (Associated Press, July 27, 1989). He was extradited in 1990, but only with the prosecutors’ promise not to seek the death penalty.

The case has been cited as precedent in international extradition cases, though today, courts in countries without the death penalty today often will not extradite to the United States because of the possibility of execution itself, regardless of how long the wait on death row, since the death penalty is seen as a violation of human rights.

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