Fate Worse Than Death - An Essay on Whether Long Times on Death Row are Cruel Times, A

Abstract

INTRODUCTION|In the United States, at last count, 2,848 men and women are prisoners on death row awaiting execution. Some of these prisoners will suffer from severe mental illnesses, while others will resign themselves to their fates. Some will be executed soon. Some will be marched to cells next to the death chambers, only to be returned to the segregation of death row when a stay of execution is granted. Many of those prisoners sentenced to death will remain on death row for years and years.|Just over a year ago, the State of Nebraska carried out its first execution of a prisoner in more than three and a half decades. On September , 1994, Harold Lamont Otey was put to death in the electric chair. Otey had been initially convicted and sentenced to death in 1978 for the murder of a young Omaha woman. Otey was just one of several notable Nebraska prisoners who have remained on death row for lengthy periods of time...