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Legal experts concerned about inmate's demand to be executed

Posted: Sunday, April 08, 2007


What makes Chapman's case groundbreaking, lawyers say, is his decision to waive trial and sentencing by a jury, and then nearly beg to be sentenced to death. Professors who teach criminal law have found Chapman's case - and its potential implications for future defendants - disturbing.

His own lawyers say Chapman is trying to use the legal system to commit "suicide by court."



"This is a defense lawyer's worst nightmare," said Michael Mello, a University of Vermont law professor and former lawyer for death row inmates in Florida.


A judge granted his request to be sentenced to death.

Nationally, volunteering for a death sentence is not new. Since 1977, when Gary Mark Gilmore waived his appeals and stepped before a firing squad in Utah, 124 inmates in 26 of the 38 states with a death penalty law have waived appeals and asked to die, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

One of the two people executed in Kentucky since 1976 waived the remainder of his appeals and was executed in 1999. And a second Kentucky Death Row inmate is attempting the same thing as Chapman.

Michael Hoffheimer, a criminal law professor at the University of Mississippi, said a ruling giving deference to a convicted man's decision to seek a death sentence could be troubling because it would take away multiple legal safeguards to ensure that only a competent, guilty person is put to death. Without those safeguards, there's a chance someone who is not guilty, but suicidal, could be executed, Hoffheimer said.

"Permitting defendants to make decisions that increase the risk of wrongful convictions is bad policy," Hoffheimer said.

Chapman's court-appointed attorneys have declined to comment.


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