THE VOLUNTEER

Portrait of a death-row inmate who, unusually, demanded to be killed by the state that imprisoned him.

“It isn’t that I want to die, it’s that I’d rather be dead than do this,” Scott Dozier tells Toboni, a documentary producer who’d happened on news that Dozier was to be executed by the use of fentanyl, having been sentenced to death in Nevada for murder. Dozier, writes Toboni, “wasn’t the sympathetic, unjustly imprisoned inmate I had first imagined for the story,” but he owned up to his crimes without special pleading. When he arrived at the penitentiary, Nevada was “imposing the highest rate of sentences in the nation,” but that suddenly stopped, and Dozier, like so many other death-row inmates, was left in limbo. He demanded that the state live up to its promise to end his life, leading to a string of legal arguments and stays of execution. Toboni occasionally wanders a little far into the weeds in examining other capital cases with seemingly only tenuous connections to Dozier’s, but all illustrate the barbarity of execution: Electrocuted prisoners burst into flames, the hanged jerk on their ropes while strangling, and lethal injections don’t always work (one sympathetic warden promises Dozier to keep extra fentanyl on hand “in the event that the people administering the drug somehow botched the administration of it”). Yet her portrait of Dozier himself is compelling, showing that in most respects he was a model prisoner well liked by almost everyone, prisoners and corrections officers alike, save for one higher-up who took a dislike to him. Interestingly, as Toboni notes, conservative politicians “are starting to tiptoe away from the death penalty” for reasons both fiscal and ideological, which will bear on future death-row inmates. As for Dozier, he found death, but not in the way he had demanded, bringing Toboni’s account to a grimly memorable conclusion.

A well-paced if sometimes diffuse narrative that raises important questions about capital punishment.