After Friends Are Executed, He Wants to Volunteer to Die

After his best friend and four other of his fellow death row inmates have been put to death in less than a year, a South Carolina inmate wants to become his own attorney—which would likely mean his own execution would come in weeks or months. A federal judge has ordered a 45-day delay in James Robertson's request in order to have a different lawyer talk to him and make sure he really wants to fire his own attorneys and deal with the likely lethal consequences of his decision. More from the AP:

• The crime: Robertson, 51, has been on death row since 1999 after killing both his parents in their Rock Hill home. He beat his father with the claw end of a hammer and a baseball bat and stabbed his mother. He tried to make it look like a robbery in hopes he would get his part of their $2.2 million estate, prosecutors said.
• The request: A one-page letter from Robinson landed in a federal judge's mailbox on April 7, four days before South Carolina executed its fifth inmate in seven months. It said Robertson and his lawyer had a difference of opinion. Since "no ethical attorney will withdraw an appeal that will result in their client's execution," Robertson said he was ready to represent himself.
• His attorney's view: Robertson's attorney Emily Paavola responded in court documents that Robertson wasn't taking medication for depression, suffered from chronic back pain and a skin condition that made him more depressed and was distressed over those five executions that dropped the close-knit death row population from 30 to 25. Included was Robertson's best friend on death row, Marion Bowman Jr., killed by lethal injection on Jan. 31, Paavola said.

• Volunteers for death: Volunteers, as they are called in death penalty circles, have been around since the death penalty was reinstated 50 years ago. About 10% of all US executions are inmates who agree to die before finishing all their appeals, according to statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center. Research by the center and academics found that nearly all volunteers had mental illness that may have led them to decide they no longer wanted to live.
• But fewer of them: The rate of volunteers has taken a steady decline along with the number of executions. From 2000 to 2009, 65 of the 590 US executions involved an inmate who dropped appeals, including Timothy McVeigh, who killed 148 people in the Oklahoma City bombing. From 2020 to now, just seven of the 111 people put to death have been considered volunteers by the center.

(More death row stories.)