Execution “volunteers”: Psychological and legal issues.

Abstract

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

The failure of a security rationale for death row.

“…Nationwide, 145 inmates made this decision since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated (Death Penalty Information Center, 2017a; see also Chapter 6, this volume), but only two capital punishment inmates from Missouri have made such a decision since Potosi Correctional Center (PCC) integrated these inmates with the general population (Death Penalty Information Center, 2017b;PCC Warden Cindy Griffith, personal communication, July 28, 2015). Rountree (2014) found some support for the hypothesis that supermaximum conditions of confinement on death row increased the proportion of inmates seeking to hasten their executions but cautioned that confounding factors were present.…”