For someone who killed with such ease, Michael Ross is finding it very hard to die. The bespectacled insurance salesman from Connecticut who murdered eight young women a generation ago has languished on death row since 1987. For much of that time, he has been begging the state to execute him. But in a region that hasn't put anyone to death in almost 45 years, Ross can't seem to prevail.
A sentence of death and a killer ready to die would seem a perfect partnership. With condemned inmates around the country spending an average of 10 years wading through appeals, both the state and the convict can get impatient. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, almost 12% of all U.S. executions have been of so-called volunteers, murderers who plead guilty and ask for death or, more commonly, waive their appeals. As death houses around the country begin to crowd with volunteers, however, their presence raises questions about whether a justice system can be fair when it is distorted by demands from the condemned.
In a climate of growing unease over the death penalty--New York's legislature rejected it last week, a month after the Supreme Court ruled against juvenile executions--the volunteers don't please either side of the debate. For the tough-on-crime crowd, they raise the unsettling possibility that for some criminals death may not be the ultimate punishment. The judicial establishment is more comfortable executing convicts when the appeals process has been lawfully exhausted so the state doesn't appear bloodthirsty. For their part, death-penalty opponents say volunteers are really victims, too brutalized by life on death row to know what they're doing. And in some cases, volunteers have reintroduced executions in parts of the country that had long resisted carrying them out.
Before Ross found his voice as a volunteer, he was a silent killer. He primarily stalked the back roads of a wedge of Connecticut called the Quiet Corner, hustling his victims into the woods before he raped and strangled them. But when he settled into death row two decades ago, the Cornell graduate became a prolific writer. He published articles embracing his fate, including pious meditations like "It's Time for Me to Die" and "My Journey Towards the Light," everywhere from the National Catholic Reporter to Might magazine. Ross's private letters reveal a far more agitated soul--alternately suicidal and manipulative--tired of the world yet hungry for its approval.
Those attitudes, according to forensic psychiatrist Eric Goldsmith, are "the usual combination" for volunteers. Murderers can be astonishingly sensitive to criticism, and offering to die can be seen as an effective shield from the accusations of society or the pangs of conscience. Ross's public defenders have told him that he could have an additional 5 to 10 years of appeals left and that his mental instability might win him commutation to life without parole. But for Ross, who wept at how few responses his more than 200 goodbye letters to pen pals and supporters elicited, the prospect of yet another penalty hearing, with its gory photos, censorious prosecutors and vengeful family members, seems a punishment worse than death. "Do you have any idea what it is like to [be] constantly judged by your absolute worst deed?" he wrote in a 1998 letter to a journalist. "It is a living hell."