When a Killer Wants to Die

By Nathan Thornburgh

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."

After years of unsuccessful schemes to end his appeals, Ross finally fired his public defenders and, in 2004, hired T.R. Paulding Jr., a lawyer with little capital-case experience who promised to help Ross die. Together, they nearly succeeded. On Oct. 6, with no defense attorneys opposing Ross's execution, the New London Superior Court quickly affirmed his right to die: lethal injection was set for Jan. 26. But his former public defenders--along with lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, the Missionary Society of Connecticut and Ross's father--argued all the way to the Supreme Court that Ross was incompetent. They were denied every time, but the salvo of challenges and surprise affidavits slowed the system just enough to keep Ross alive.

Tremendous pressure was also building on Paulding. Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death-penalty crusader and author of Dead Man Walking, called the devout Catholic attorney on the phone. Prejean says the conversation was blunt: "'T.R.,' I told him, 'you are the one movable part of this machinery of death.'" Eventually, a judge made an extraordinary threat to take away Paulding's law license if any new evidence about Ross's competence emerged after he had been executed. An hour from death, Ross backed down--in order to save his lawyer's neck, he says. The aborted execution cost the state of Connecticut $289,000 in wasted preparations and brought fresh anguish to the victims' families. The execution has been rescheduled for May 11, and Ross says he remains committed to die.

There was no such delay for Florida volunteer Glen Ocha, 47, who was put to death earlier this month for a 1999 murder. While on death row, Ocha fired his lawyer and tried to change his legal name to Raven Raven. Of the last 12 criminals executed in Florida, eight were volunteers.

Time and again, volunteers have jump-started dormant death houses. Gary Gilmore, whose 1977 execution rang in the modern capital-punishment era, was a volunteer. So was Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the first federal prisoner executed since 1963. Death-row inmates often recognize what's at stake. In Ohio in 1997, rioting death-row inmates attempted to kill Wilford Lee Berry Jr., who was trying to become the first Ohioan executed in more than 30 years. Berry survived the beating and was put to death in 1999. Since then, 15 other Ohio inmates have been executed.

It is unclear whether Ross's execution would have that quickening effect. The last New England execution took place in 1960. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed that although 70% of Connecticut respondents want Ross executed, in general just 37% favor the death penalty over life without parole. Being the exception may be part of Ross's motivation. "Michael relishes the idea of being the only one," says Robert Nave, who, as head of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty, has visited Ross frequently. "I think he knows he'll go down in history as the first--and perhaps the last-- guy executed in modern New England."

That kind of control and attention, rare commodities in prison, are part of what makes volunteering attractive. Texas had planned to execute Alexander Martinez, 28, on March 10, less than three years after he waived his appeals. The former runaway spent a lifetime being abused and abusing others. Along the way, he developed a tangle of homicidal fantasies and longings for acceptance. During a stint in prison, Mexican Mafia inmates became his new family. To impress them after he was paroled, he killed a prostitute and quickly bragged about it to cops. In an interview with TIME, Martinez was resolute about staying a step ahead of what he considered a rigged system. "I'm not gonna play their game," he said. "I might as well go out now." But even in Texas, which has executed more volunteers than any other state, it's not that simple: barely a week from death, Martinez had his execution postponed for three months to ensure that his paperwork is in order.

In Connecticut, Raymond Roode wishes the state would expedite Michael Ross's execution. Twenty years ago, Ross killed Roode's 14-year-old stepdaughter and her best friend. Roode says the state should execute Ross on its own schedule, not the killer's. He suspects Ross will find a way to get out of his May date with the needle. "It just makes me sick," says Roode, "that he's still calling the shots." --With reporting by Wendy Grossman/ Houston and David E. Thigpen/ Chicago

With reporting by Wendy Grossman/ Houston, David E. Thigpen/ Chicago