A Right to Die: Termination of Appeal for Condemned Prisoners

Abstract

There currently are nearly thirteen hundred persons in American prisons under sentence of death. For the vast majority of them, the elaborate state and federal appeals process can and will delay execution months, years, perhaps indefinitely. They wish to live, and their lawyers will explore every legal avenue in order to keep their clients alive. For some on death row, however, the darkest fear is not execution, but the prospect of living out their natural years incarcerated in a six-by-nine cell, under constant surveillance, with little or no hope of ever regaining their freedom. For these men and women, termination of their appeals and execution of sentence may well appear as a preferable option to an inexorable mental and physical deterioration. They want to hear the executioner's song. Of those executions carried out in the United States since the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment does not violate the eighth amendment,' several have been termed voluntary, in that the condemned prisoners cut off their appeals in order to hasten their punishment.2 So long as the current system continues, with its opportunities for numerous appeals and delays but with the death sentence an ever more frequently imposed penalty, we may expect some of the present and future occupants of death row to terminate their appeals. Such a decision raises not only legal but moral questions as well; indeed, some opponents of capital punishment argue that there is no right to terminate appeals because this leads to