About 11% of death‐sentenced prisoners executed in the United States hastened executions by abandoning their appeals. How do these prisoners persuade courts to allow them to abandon their appeals? Further, how do legal structures and processes organize these explanations, and what do they conceal? An analysis of Texas cases suggests that prisoners marshal explanations for their desires to hasten execution that echo prevailing cultural beliefs about punishment and the death penalty. The coherence of these accounts is amplified by a non‐adversarial, unreliable legal process. This article contributes to our understanding of legal narratives, and expands their analysis to include not only hegemonic stories and legal rules, but also the legal process that generates them.

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A pproximately 10% of those executed in the United States are deathsentenced prisoners who sought, or at some point declined to contest, their own execution. Commonly called volunteers, these prisoners succeed in hastening execution by waiving their right to full judicial review of their conviction and sentence. Volunteers have been executed in 28 states and by the federal government. Between 1977, marking the first execution in the modern (post-Furman v. Georgia, 1972) era of capital punishment, and 2016, nearly as many volunteers (145) were executed as death-sentenced prisoners were exonerated (156; Death Penalty Information Center, 2017b, 2017c.Exonerations have prompted extensive scrutiny of the legal processes leading to the death sentences in those cases. By contrast, the fact that volunteers bypass legal procedures designed to ensure that only the "worst of the worst" are executed has attracted considerably less attention

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