A Supreme Court Boost for Suicide?

When the Supreme Court ruled last month that lethal injection didn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment, there was rejoicing from a peculiar interest group: death row inmates who have been trying to get the state to kill them quickly.

Many legal observers saw the court's decision as a victory for those who see the death penalty appeals process as a seemingly endless and cynical abuse of the system. (Death row appeals had been taking an average of approximately 12 years even before the seven-month national moratorium on executions preceding the decision.) But it was also a victory for that subset of prisoners who have waived all their appeals, fired their lawyers and written letters to governors begging for an execution date. These "volunteers" constitute 11% of executions nationwide, and will continue to dominate both the headlines and the execution schedules (8 of the last 16 executions in Florida have been volunteers) long after this ruling. Volunteers are a byproduct of the tortuous slowness of the process, and the court's narrow finding ultimately will do little to speed up the works.

Gary Gilmore, the first man executed after the death penalty resumed in 1976, was a volunteer. So were infamous inmates like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and serial murderer Aileen Wuornos. Exactly three years ago a Connecticut serial killer named Michael Ross became the first man executed in New England in four decades after clamoring loudly for his own death. In each instance the volunteers hijacked the justice system, and Ross's case was no different: he engaged in a long and public opera of narcissism, self-pity, and, in essence, self-promotion. His victims were all but forgotten. The state was no longer in control of the timing or even outcome of the sentencing. It became all about Ross.

Volunteers make all sides of the debate uncomfortable. Death penalty supporters are uneasy with the idea that some prisoners may see their death sentence as a relief from a tortured life. Anti-death penalty activists are discomfited by anyone who doesn't want their solidarity, much less their legal help. The courts don't want their appeals process short-circuited by the inmates' suicidal ideations.

So it's a bad sign for justice that last week, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, Kentucky death row inmate Marco Allen Chapman announced again that he wants to his lawyers to stop fighting for his life. "I guess it's kind of my Christian upbringing," he told an AP reporter. "Suicide is unforgivable. I figure if I'm not doing it to myself, it's not a suicide." The Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammed also raised his hand briefly, asking in a letter for the state to go ahead and "murder this innocent black man." (He later reversed course and said through his lawyers he would continue to appeal his sentence.)

Why are there so many volunteers? The main reason is that the process has become so interminable that death, to some, seems a better choice than life in appeals. The death penalty was originally designed to be carried out in three to six months, and housing and services for inmates were accordingly shabby, meant for a transient population. "Nobody wants to spend money on a dead man," is how Robert Nave, who helps coordinate Amnesty International's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty, puts it. And yet the process has become so sclerotic that execution is now just the third most common cause of death on California's death row. Prisoners there are more likely to die of natural causes or by suicide in their cell than by lethal injection. If the D.C. Madam committed suicide to evade a potentially brief jail term in comparative comfort, the same option must be far more attractive to those facing a dozen years or more on death row.

The Supreme Court ruling has had some immediate effect: those who were near their dates before the seven-month moratorium are now being quickly lined up for execution. Georgia put murderer William Earl Lynd to death on May 6. But this resolution of the lethal injection fight won't speed up the system in the long run. There will still be a deep well of public and legal opposition that will fund new challenges to capital punishment, just as there were decades of challenges and moratoriums long before questions arose about lethal injection.

In fact, the death penalty is dying its own de facto death in most places around the country, due to concerns about everything from death row exonerations to the high costs of capital punishment. As Nave points out, since the start of the 1990s, the number of death sentences handed out and actual executions have declined, as have the number of death-eligible crimes being charged. Death row populations themselves have also dwindled, through commutation and attrition as much as through actual execution. New Jersey abolished the death penalty outright last fall, while other states have simply stopped exercising it.

As it loses momentum around the country, the wait times become longer and the resources to speed the appeals process becomes scarcer, the ones who are actually put to death will increasingly be the ones who beg for their own execution. It's a vision of the future of justice that should make everyone uncomfortable.

Source: Time.com