Serial Killer's Willing Execution Sparks Death Penalty Row

A serial killer who has said he wants to die was due to be given a lethal injection in New England this morning in a case that has provoked claims that the state is encouraging suicide.

Michael Ross can stop his execution at any time until the moment he is given the injection by saying he wants to appeal, but has shown little inclination to do so.

His family has been campaigning for him to be taken off death row, launching appeals of their own which have been ignored.

Ross was sentenced to death for murdering and raping four young women in eastern Connecticut in the early 1980s and has confessed to four other murders in Connecticut and New York. He was due to be given a lethal injection at one minute past 2am local time today, becoming the first person executed in the state for 45 years.

But his family and anti-death penalty campaigners claim the lethal injection amounts to state-sponsored suicide, and would result in "suicide contagion" spreading among prisoners.

"These prisoners will try to kill themselves in the hours, days and weeks following Michael's death," claimed a failed lawsuit filed by Ross's father this week.

Ross, 45, decided to end his appeals and accept his death sentence last year, and was hours away from being put to death in January when his lawyer, under pressure from a federal judge, asked for a new hearing to examine whether he was sane.

A superior court judge found him competent after a hearing last month, and the state supreme court upheld that ruling this week .

Diane Polan, a lawyer for the killer's sister, Donna Dunham, argued that Ross has been coerced into deciding to die by his own narcissism and the harsh conditions of living on death row.

"Saying he is competent is not the same as saying he's capable," Ms Polan said.

Ross's case has divided opinion. A video recorded during a psychiatric evaluation this year showing Ross laughing and putting his thumbs up to the camera has been shown repeatedly on television in recent weeks.

Anti-death penalty campaigners claim it shows he is mentally disturbed, while others say his self-assurance suggests he is in control of his own fate.

"He will always hold in his hand the opportunity to change his mind," Christopher Morano, the chief state attorney, whose office prosecuted Ross, told the New York Times.

If he is executed, Ross will join more than a hundred "volunteers" who have waived appeals and hastened their deaths since capital punishment was reinstated in the US more than a generation ago.

Like inmates on death row across America, Ross has spent most of his sentence locked in a small cell with no access to prison sports or education programmes, and no interaction with other inmates.

In an essay posted on the internet by the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Ross describes his sliver of a window as offering "a wonderful view of the razor-wire fencing and outdoor recreation yard of the prison next door".

Of the 963 people executed in the past 30 years, one in eight asked for their appeals to be dropped. Last year the rate rose to one in six. In Florida alone, eight of the last 12 executions were people who ended their legal fights.

Those who have ended their appeals include the youngest, a 22-year-old killer in Oklahoma; the first, Gary Gilmore, executed by firing squad in Utah in 1977; and the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh.