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.

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