A new study by Prof. Meredith Martin Rountree of Northwestern University Law School examined the characteristics of Texas death row inmates who waived all or part of their normal appeals, thus hastening their execution. Referring to these inmates as “volunteers,” she compared them with similarly-situated inmates who did not waive their appeals. She found that more volunteers experienced depression or had attempted suicide than non-volunteers. She also examined the role of “self-blame” in prisoners’ decisions to move towards execution. Inmates who waived appeals were more likely “to have been previously convicted of a crime, to have been convicted of a crime against another person, to have been incarcerated, to have committed their capital offenses alone, and to have committed the capital offense with a gun.” Prof. Rountree criticized the legal changes begun in the mid-1990s that have allowed inmates to waive appeals earlier in the process “when prisoners may be most vulnerable to desires to die.” She noted “the State’s interest in fair and constitutional death sentences, something only ensured through adversarial testing of the conviction and sentence,” and called for further research in this area.
(M. Martin Rountree, “Volunteers for Execution: Directions for Further Research into Grief, Culpability, and Legal Structures,” 82 University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review 295 (2014)). See Studies and Volunteers.
