Ross talks at length about everything from his extensive knowledge of death-penalty law to his love of cryptograms, jigsaw puzzles and old movies like “The Great Escape” and “It's a Wonderful Life.”
He repeatedly revisits his rage at the public defenders who have tried to stop his execution, and who would, he says, have him pursue appeals that could drag his case out for another 10 to 15 years.
And he makes and laughs at his own jokes.
“Isn't that what they say: If you think you're crazy, you're not; if you don't, you are?” he asks. “Maybe it's the same with competency.”
He talks about how Thanksgiving Day is a hard day for him, because it was on that day in 1983 that Joan Stavinsky was visited not by her 19-year-old daughter, Robin, but by two state troopers, who had come to her house to tell her of Robin's murder.
“So every Thanksgiving I wonder: How can they have a normal Thanksgiving?” Ross says. “How can they possibly ever have a normal Thanksgiving because of that?
“The mother was expecting her daughter to come home. Instead she had to go to the morgue and identify her daughter. Thanksgiving is always difficult for me.”
“Me.” “Difficult for me.” Throughout the course of the interview, Ross returns again and again to his favorite topic. Even when he speaks of the parents' pain, he makes himself the subject: He has the power to make it stop.
He reads from a newspaper article quoting Edwin Shelley, the father of 14-year-old Leslie Shelley, the only victim Ross did not rape, a tiny girl tied up and forced to listen as her best friend was raped and strangled before she too would die.
Shelley is speaking of the pain he has felt for the past 20 years, and how it is renewed with each new appeal: “‘You could live with it, adjust to it, but when it's brought back, it's agony,'” Ross reads.
He thrusts the newspaper through the bars at Norko.
“That's the point right there,” he says. “You can keep that and put that in your damn report, because I think it's friggin' important.”
He bursts into tears, takes off his glasses, dabs his eyes with a paper towel and mutters, “Sorry.”
Then he blurts out, “I just don't understand why the public defenders don't understand that. It's so simple! And it's my damn decision!”
His lawyers are making a new argument that Ross is incompetent to make this decision due to "Death Row Syndrome." The New York Times article and this Slate article discuss the concept, which is basically that Death Row depresses people too much to function and think normally, and therefore any decision that the inmate makes to stop fighting the appeals and end his or her own life is not a competent one. The effect would be that an inmate would be forced to pursue every viable appeal before the death sentence is imposed, a process which Ross rightly points out could take years. Key quotes from Slate:
"For most of its public life, what the Ross lawyers called "death row syndrome" has been known as "death row phenomenon," a vaguely defined term that refers to the dehumanizing effects of living for a prolonged period on death row. The term is legal, not clinical: Neither death row syndrome nor death row phenomenon is recognized by the American Psychiatric Association (or represented in its handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). It was first coined not by psychiatrists, but in the extradition hearings of a German citizen, Jens Soering, who was arrested in England and charged with murders committed on American soil in 1985.
Standing before the European Court of Human Rights in 1989, Soering argued that the conditions he would live under while awaiting execution, which he called the "death row phenomenon," constituted inhumane and degrading treatment. He said the prolonged interval between sentencing and execution, and the damaging experience of living during that time with severely limited freedom, minimal—if any—contact with other inmates, and always under the approaching cloud of impending execution were elements of the "phenomenon" that would make his incarceration as psychically damaging as a similar period of torture. The court agreed. . . .
What's odd about the Ross lawyers' use of Soering's term is that they're not using it to describe how cruel and dehumanizing death row is. They used it to suggest that Ross is clinically incapable of fighting for himself. . . ."
Obligatory blog commentary: I have little sympathy for Ross, given what he's done, but wouldn't this also be a particular brand of torture? As a principle, I think it's tenuous. We recognize the right of a criminal defendant to go pro se, even if it's not exactly the smartest decision, because we believe in an individual's freedom to choose. So long as Ross is not clinically insane, shouldn't he be afforded the right to choose whether to pursue the appeal or not? In order to abrogate that right, shouldn't the Court require counsel to show that the "syndrome" rises to the level of legal incompetence - that he doesn't recognize where he is, what he's doing, or is incapable (not unwilling) of assisting in his own defense?
No comments:
Post a Comment