Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty

Ross Execution Postscript

Connecticut executed Michael Ross on May 13, 2005. The immediate cause of the execution was a decision Connecticut Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford rendered on April 22, 2005 that Ross was competent to waive any further appeals. But as with so many death penalty cases, the end was arrived at by way of a convoluted path, one that hardly demonstrated the wisdom of Connecticut’s capital punishment scheme.

Judge Clifford was first asked to consider whether Ross was competent to waive his appeal rights in the fall of 2004. Ross had fired the state public defender’s office and retained attorney T. R. Paulding, who was willing to represent him as he sought an execution date. The result was a proceeding unlike the typical court hearing in which one party is adverse to the other and a neutral judge is asked to decide between them. Ross argued that he was competent to waive his appeal rights, the state of Connecticut not surprisingly agreed with him, and lo and behold Judge Clifford, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, found him competent.

The only reason there was a second hearing at all was because the public defender managed to convince Federal District Court Judge Robert Chatigny to intervene. Judge Chatigny questioned the finding that Ross was competent because Clifford had not explored the psychiatric effects that years on death row may have had on Ross’s desire to die. The judge also threatened to report attorney Paulding to the bar for discipline if he found out Paulding had been withholding any evidence that Ross was incompetent.

Shaken, Paulding requested that Judge Clifford reopen the competency hearing. This time, Clifford heard testimony from four psychiatrists, two on each side of the competency issue including Michael Norko, the sole psychiatric witness at the first hearing who admitted then that he was not well versed in the effects of imprisonment on mental health. Ross, as might have been expected, was uncooperative with the attempts to prove him incompetent. When interviewed by Dr. Stuart Grassian, who has studied the psychiatric impact of imprisonment, Ross taunted Grassian, saying he would not be able to prove him incompetent. He also predicted that Clifford would find him competent because if he did not, “The people of New London would drag him out and tar and feather him.”

Clifford’s opinion gives no hint that he feared a mob would publicly humiliate him, but it is odd nonetheless. Clifford recognized that Ross suffered from sexual sadism, depression, narcissism, and anxiety, and has attempted suicide in the past. He acknowledged the evidence that Ross has said he does not want to grow old and die in prison and the testimony that Ross decided to seek execution when he was depressed and that, as a narcissist, he could not bear the humiliation of backing down from that decision. Indeed, his opinion spent more time describing the testimony of the psychiatrists who thought Ross incompetent than those who thought him competent, including Grassian’s testimony that Ross’s decision was “a desperate act by a desperate man who wants to go out in a ‘blaze of glory.’” But for all that, Clifford ultimately concluded that Ross had “a realistic and mentally healthy attitude about his situation.”

How Judge Clifford could reconcile his findings that Ross was both a depressed, narcissistic, sexual sadist and yet was a realistic and mentally healthy individual, he did not adequately explain. Although he claimed simply to have accepted the views of the state’s psychiatrists, there are hints in the opinion that he reached his own conclusions about Ross’s mental health and found Ross competent because he had “thought long and hard over an extended period of time” about seeking death. What in his legal training allowed him to reach such a conclusion, he did not say.

Judge Clifford acknowledged that in finding Ross’s decision to seek to be executed rational, he was not saying it was sensible. But in declaring that a person confined on death row could rationally conclude that execution was preferable to continued confinement under the threat of death, the judge said something that should have affected what sensibly should have happened here. If it really is rational for someone in Ross’s position to seek death, then the sensible solution would not have been to kill that person, but to question the wisdom of a system that confines a man under circumstances in which he ends up begging for death.

As also might have been expected, Ross had the last word. He wrote a letter that Dr. Grassian received after the execution in which he again mocked Grassian’s efforts saying, “Check and mate. You never had a chance.”

Ross treated the legal system as a farce. Our system of justice is just too important to accept this. The solution is obvious. Because it was capital punishment with all its attendant machinations and opportunities for publicity that gave Ross his chances for street theater, the abandonment of capital punishment would solve the problem.

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