NCADP: National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

Ross Case Highlights "Death Row Syndrome"

Associated Press February 01, 2005
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Shortly after his third suicide attempt, serial killer Michael Ross wrote that life on death row was increasingly unbearable. He described the isolation of sitting in his cell 23 hours a day for years amid the endless slamming of metal and dark thoughts of his own horrific crimes and his impending execution.

"I've been doing this for 19 years now - 16 on death row - and it gets harder every year," Ross wrote in 2003, according to court papers. "I honestly don't think I can do much more of this. I now understand why 12 percent of the men executed in this country were men who gave up their appeals and 'volunteered' for execution."

Ross, who has been seeking his own death and hired a lawyer to forgo his appeals, was supposed to die by injection Monday in New England's first execution in 45 years.

But Ross' fate is now in question after his lawyer filed papers requesting a hearing to examine whether Ross suffers from what some experts call "death row syndrome" - that is, he has become unhinged from being on death row and is no longer mentally competent to decide his fate.

Death row syndrome, sometimes called death row phenomenon, refers to the psychological effects of living under a death sentence. The concept dates back to at least 1989, when the European Court of Human Rights deplored "death row phenomenon" in an extradition case involving a man charged with murder in Virginia.

No death sentence has been overturned in the United States because of death row syndrome, according to Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. But a few Supreme Court justices have said they want to look at the effects of prolonged stays on death row, Dieter said.

Last year, 16 percent of the 59 people executed in the United States had waived appeals, up from an average of about 11 percent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

"It keeps going up and up," said David Elliot, spokesman for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "The desolate conditions of death row lend themselves to both mental illness and a sense of hopelessness and despair."

Ross, a 45-year-old Cornell University graduate, has confessed to eight murders in Connecticut and New York in the early 1980s.

A state psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Norko, previously declared Ross competent to decide to die. But Norko now believes that he may have come to a different conclusion had he had access to Ross' writings.

Attorneys for Ross' father said they also have evidence of his incompetence, including letters from a retired deputy warden at Northern Correctional Institution and a prisoner who knew Ross.

"I can best describe Northern as living in a submarine or a cave," wrote John Tokarz, the former deputy warden. "On many occasions it was suggested that department staff assigned to Northern should be rotated every two years because of the effect the conditions of Northern could have on their mental health."

The prisoner, Ramon Lopez, said he believes state mental health workers may have coerced Ross to drop his appeals.

T. R. Paulding Jr., Ross' attorney, sought the delay after U.S. District Judge Robert Chatigny warned him on Friday to take the new evidence seriously.

State officials reject the death row syndrome claims. Other judges have found Ross competent.

"Certainly, we would very vigorously contest that there is a death row syndrome or a segregated housing syndrome that affects all death row prisoners and makes them incompetent to voluntarily, knowingly, intelligently, waive their rights," said Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Dr. Stuart Grassian, an expert in death row inmates, said in court papers filed by Ross' public defenders, that inmates often "volunteer" for execution.

"The conditions of confinement are so oppressive, the helplessness endured in the roller coaster of hope and despair so wrenching and exhausting, that ultimately the inmate can no longer bear it, and then it is only in dropping his appeals that he has any sense of control over his fate," Grassian wrote.

Ross says he tried three times to commit suicide behind bars, most recently in 2003, by trying to overdose on Tylenol, Sudafed and Motrin. Another time, he tried to kill himself by putting a bag over his head, one of his attorneys said.

During hearings in December, Ross testified that he wants to speed his execution to spare the families of his victims further pain. But he has written that there are other motives.

"The truth is I was driven more by a desire to end my own pain than out of a noble cause," Ross wrote in 1998. "However, I knew that I couldn't say that publicly, so I denied my own desire to leave this world and played on the noble cause of protecting the families of my victims."