Robert Comer
© AFP/DOC-HO WASHINGTON (AFP) - The fates of Robert Comer and Christopher Newton amount to state-assisted suicide and reveal the psychological damage caused by prolonged solitary confinement, campaigners against the death penalty argue.
Comer, 55, was convicted of shooting dead a stranger at an Arizona campsite in 1987 and then abducting and raping a woman who was camping nearby.
Held for years in a windowless cell inside a maximum-security "Supermax" prison, Comer abandoned all appeals in 1998 and is scheduled to die on Tuesday, in what would be Arizona's first execution since 2000.
Newton, 37, has spent most of his adult life in and out of the Ohio jail system. Convinced that he would never leave prison, he killed his cellmate in 2001, and is due to be executed on Thursday.
Since the United States resumed executions in 1976, 124 Death Row inmates have abandoned the appeals process and chosen to die, nearly one in nine of all executions.
According to a report by Amnesty International, nearly all of these "volunteers" suffer grave mental health problems.
It said explanations for their decision include mental disorder, remorse, bravado, religious belief, a quest for notoriety, the severity of prison life, and despair at the drawn-out appeals procedure.
Execution chamber
© AFP/DOC-HO/File The London-based human-rights group, which believes the death penalty is morally wrong, also cited "the desire to gain a semblance of control over a situation in which the prisoner is otherwise powerless."
"Amnesty International questions whether a decision taken by someone who is under threat of death at the hands of others can be truly voluntary," the report said.
"Even if it were, there is no disguising the fact that the state is pursuing a killing that is at least as calculated, and in all likelihood more so, as any murder for which the condemned inmate is being punished."
John Blume, a law professor who has represented dozens of Death Row convicts, says many of them talk about cutting short their appeals "but we usually manage to make them change their mind."
"It's very discouraging to see them give up hope and not want to go on," he said. "It's understandable, because the conditions under which they live are so tough. It feels as if you're watching somebody commit suicide."
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said death row in US prisons was never intended to house inmates for up to 30 years pending their execution.
Typically isolated for 22 hours each day, the inmates face "an extra punishment" for their crime and are not always responsible themselves for dragging out appeals for decades, he said.
A holding cell
© AFP/DOC-HO/File In California, anyone who appeals against their death sentence must wait at least four years before they can be assigned a new lawyer, according to Dieter.
In 2005, Catholic nun Eileen Reilly accompanied Michael Ross, a Connecticut serial killer, along the long walk down death row after he requested execution following 20 years of fruitless appeals.
"He told me 'if you come, the only thing we cannot talk about is my decision'," she said.
"Actually, when I got there, that's all he talked about. There was always an attempt to get me to agree. But I couldn't, it would have made me complicit to what the state was doing."
©AFP