A Fate Worse Than Death
It was an uncommon ask: “I, Scott Raymond Dozier, #1011605, of sound mind, do hereby request that my death sentence be enacted and I be put to death.” These were the words written in 2016 by a Nevada death row inmate. Dozier had been sentenced to death in 2007 for killing a man and dismembering his body; he was also convicted, two years earlier, of another murder. While his appeals process kept pushing the execution date back, he eventually asked that no more effort be made by anyone to prevent it.
After writing his request, however, Dozier was twice marched to the brink of execution, only for it to be stayed. He found it excruciating. “It isn’t that I want to die,” Dozier told Gianna Toboni, a documentarian with the HBO show VICE. “It’s that I’d rather be dead than do this.”
Toboni came to see how this treatment epitomized the cruelty, waste, and dysfunction of state-sanctioned murder. Her new book, The Volunteer: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate’s Quest to Die with Dignity, tells Dozier’s story while also looking at the larger issues surrounding capital punishment.
Dozier emerges as a likeable if gratuitously profane character. He had what could be described as an ordinary childhood in an ordinary family, and was seen by others in his community as talented and smart. He served in the military for two years and was honorably discharged. He became a husband and father. He also got involved in dealing drugs, and into situations and decisions that could not be undone.
The Volunteer: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate’s Quest to Die with Dignity
By Gianna Toboni
Atria Books, 320 pages
Publication date: April 1, 2025
The book, in its study of the death penalty, explores the various methods of execution that have been used in the United States—including hanging, electrocution, gassing, lethal injection, and firing squads. Each is uniquely horrible, with incalculable costs to all involved. During the 1983 electrocution of an Alabama man named John Louis Evans, his body caught fire, filling the room with the smell of burning flesh during the fourteen minutes and three jolts of electricity it took to kill him. During his 1994 execution, David Larson of North Carolina thrashed and screamed “I’m human! I’m human! Don’t kill me!” as his chamber filled with cyanide gas.
And death by lethal injection has always been nightmarish, due in part to the difficulty of obtaining the necessary drugs. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Toboni writes, there was “at least one botched execution every year” involving lethal injection in Texas alone, including “reports of choking, heaving, gasping, and even a doctor cutting open an inmate’s groin to find a vein—a method known as a cutdown.”
Asked by Toboni what his preferred method of execution would be, Dozier said he would like to be shot “in the fucking face.” When she pointed out that this “seems pretty brutal,” he emphatically agreed. “You are murdering somebody,” he told her. “This whole charade that it’s not brutal is fucking stupid.”
Toboni’s thesis is not that the death penalty is wrong—although it’s hard to argue otherwise—but rather that it’s not working. And it’s unlikely that President Donald Trump, in his zeal to extend the death penalty to more crimes and for more individuals, will make it work any better.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order calling on the U.S. Attorney General to seek the death penalty for every capital crime committed by “an alien illegally present in this country” or that involves the murder of a law enforcement officer. (Beating, choking, kicking, and asphyxiating officers at his instigation will presumably remain forgivable offenses.)
Trump’s order scolds his predecessor, Joe Biden, for commuting the sentences of thirty-seven individuals on federal death row. The current President calls them “vile and sadistic rapists, child molesters, and murderers” who “brutalized young children, strangled and drowned their victims, and hunted strangers for sport.” As always with Trump’s pronouncements, he frames the outcome he wants—more people being killed by the state—as a moral imperative and civic obligation, saying, “Judges who oppose capital punishment have . . . disregarded the law” by not recognizing its Constitutionality.
What’s wrong with the death penalty in America? Let us count the ways. First, it is imposed on innocent as well as guilty people. Toboni cites a statistic that 160 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973. Second, it’s racist: Black people account for 41 percent of death row inmates, even though they make up just 13 percent of the population. A study of two thousand murder cases in Georgia in the 1970s found that Black defendants convicted of killing white people were more than four times as likely to receive the death penalty than defendants who killed Black people.
Despite these problems, the number of people killed by their government in the United States soared by 700 percent between 1991 and 1999, with lethal injection being the method of choice in nearly 96 percent of executions. And the will to kill remains strong today. In 2022, Toboni reports, 55 percent of the American public is in favor of the death penalty, up from 42 percent in 1966.
Among the minority of U.S. residents who oppose the death penalty, ironically, are conservatives who deem it fiscally wasteful and something the government is frankly just not good at.
“They see it as failed policies for victims’ families,” Demetrius Minor, the national manager of a group called Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, tells Toboni. “For those who hold pro-life views, they view this as a contradiction of being pro-life and its totality, and they just don’t see capital punishment as something that makes the public safer,” Toboni writes.
In fact, as Toboni relates, “The most likely outcome of a death sentence in America is not that it will be executed, or that the inmate will die in prison. It is that their conviction or death sentence will be overturned.”
Almost half of the death sentences issued in the United States since 1972 have subsequently been reversed. An actual execution takes place in just 15.7 percent of cases. “The rest,” writes Toboni, “are living with active sentences on death row, have died before being executed, or have received clemency.”
And, as noted, many of the executions that do occur are horror shows. A 2022 nationwide analysis showed that 35 percent were botched due to “executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves.” Death penalty expert Deborah Denno points out in the book that botched executions have been happening for decades. “People always characterize these botches as sort of a fluke,” he told Toboni. “But it’s been forty years of flukes and they get worse and worse.”
The state of Nevada never did execute Dozier. He found his own ways to escape the living hell that was his life by hanging himself from a bed sheet attached to an air vent in his cell at the age of forty-eight. The Volunteer doesn’t honor that choice so much as explain it.