Execution volunteerism: Yet another death penalty horror | STEPHEN COOPER

Oddly, an article published recently by CNN bore the title “Alabama man convicted of killing 5 people asks to be executed: ‘It’s the right thing to do.’” This was odd, I submit, because when a mass murderer suggests what the “right” thing to do is, running in the opposite direction of that assessment is invariably the path one should take.

The CNN article focuses on the case of execution volunteer, Derrick Dearman. Dearman fired his Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) lawyers, says he doesn’t want to appeal his death sentence anymore, and even wrote to Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General (AG) Steve Marshall “asking them to carry out his death sentence.”

Dearman told CNN: “It’s just time to do what is right and what I know I gotta do.”

Bizarrely the CNN piece ventures: “It’s unknown whether or when Dearborn’s [sic] request might be fulfilled.” Bizarre, I submit, not because of the misspelling of Dearman’s name, but because the CNN authors obviously aren’t very knowledgeable about the all-too dependable — and torturous — administration of the death penalty in Alabama. Indeed, the most distinctive feature of the Alabama death penalty is it can be consistently relied on to horrendously torture condemned prisoners.

Be it through slicing and sticking their bodies with knives and needles, or, via the state’s newly contrived abomination, nitrogen-gassing, newsflash: Alabama has been torturing poor people for so long with capital punishment, stopping its addiction to torture seems depressingly impossible. Heck, according to EJI, Alabama consistently has one of the highest per capita execution rates in the nation. And it’s right at the top of the list when it comes to messing executions up. It sounds horrible — and it is — but executing human beings, and periodically bungling these executions brutally, is a way of life in Alabama, as normalized as a tailgating party before a football game.

So, while it may be unknown exactly “when” Dearman’s request to enlist the state in his suicidal desire will be granted, wondering “whether” his request will be granted is akin to wondering whether the majority of folks in Alabama think football is a big deal. In fact, I’d wager Governor Ivey and AG Marshall told their respective staff members to bring Dearman’s letters to them straight away — on a platter, with Dearman’s figurative head. That way they can run Dearman’s death wish through all the necessary channels — faster than a “lottery pick” Alabama football player ever ran a 40-yard dash.

But, just because Dearman’s decided he wants to drop his appeals because he doesn’t want to live anymore, and just because Governor Ivey and AG Marshall will be only too happy to assist his self-destruction, doesn’t mean, as Dearman insists, that using the state’s rickety and error-prone “machinery of death” — to grind the life out of Dearman’s body — is the “right” thing to do.

In fact, as I recently asserted in these pages, executing Dearman or anyone, is decidedly not the “right” thing to do. Not ever. And this is especially apparent when it turns citizens — in whose name these ghoulish executions are committed—into sadistic torturers (something which, in Alabama, happens with nightmarish regularity).

To reiterate my position: All good, God-fearing, God-loving people, must reject capital punishment. Because despite the wars and violence raging all around us, it is God and God alonewho has the authority to decide when a human life, even one being “lived” such as that is feasible in a “hell on earth” prison — like the one Dearman’s imprisoned in — is due to be extinguished. Governor Ivey, AG Marshall, and Dearman, should not be empowered to make this decision — the decision about when Dearman breathes his last breath. Only God should. (Not for nothing, in “Death-Row Inmates Prefer Death to Life,” Bryan Robinson persuasively pointed out, in 2006, for ABC News that: “Allowing volunteer executions…empowers prisoners, allowing them to essentially schedule their deaths… and escape accountability, not embrace it.)

Now anyone who’s paid any attention to the death penalty for any length of time knows, “execution volunteerism,” like the dependability of torture during Alabama executions, isn’t novel. Gary Gilmore, the first prisoner to be executed after the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, volunteered for his 1977 execution because he didn’t want to live the remainder of his life on death row. Furthermore, as the 1993 article, “Death row ‘volunteers’ eager for execution” observed, “Such volunteerism — viewed by capital punishment opponents as a form of virtual suicide — is increasingly common[.]”

Robert Phillips documented this uptick in Crime Magazine,in October 2009, recounting that “volunteers have been executed in Nevada, Florida, Indiana, Arkansas, Virginia, California and Oklahoma.” Phillips’s article, “Volunteering for Death: The Fast Track to the Death House,” concluded: “The most prevalent reason cited is that life on death row is not really life.” Notably, in delving into the “depravity of death row,” Phillips’s piece discusses the cases of three Alabama prisoners who decided, due to their bleak isolation and extremely harsh living conditions, to drop their appeals; the three were ultimately executed in the state’s electric chair.

However, the fact that ample precedent exists for what Dearman wants, and, that conditions on Alabama’s death row are so bad the state’s condemned have a history of volunteering to be executed, should not be the lodestones upon which a civilized society determines whether killing Dearman is, in fact, as Dearman himself is now insisting, the “right” thing to do.

Because, as legendary Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall elegantly stated in Lenhard v. Wolff: “[T]he consent of a convicted defendant in a criminal case does not privilege a State to impose a punishment otherwise forbidden by the Eighth Amendment….[T]he Eighth Amendment not only protects the right of individuals not to be victims of cruel and unusual punishment, but…it also expresses a fundamental interest of society in ensuring that state authority is not used to administer barbaric punishments.”

As its inaugural, torturous nitrogen-gassing execution showed, and, so many other gruesome spectacles before that, Alabama executions consistently deliver barbarity. The fact that Dearman, a murderer many times over, is egging Alabama on to engage in even more barbarity, by murdering him, and quickly, is reason enough not to take him up on it.

The right thing to do is simple: Don’t kill anyone.

Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. Follow him on "X"/Twitter @SteveCooperEsq

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Execution volunteerism: Yet another death penalty horror | STEPHEN COOPER