The scheduled execution this week of Terry Jess Dennis at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City again raises the serious questions of whether the state is "assisting" in suicide and whether it has the right, regardless, to cause the death of a mentally ill man.
Dennis' case is a particularly gruesome one. He killed a woman in Reno in 1999 after a three-day sex and vodka binge, then had sex with her body. "I actually enjoyed it," he said of the slaying.
At the time, he already had three felonies on his record. He has tried to commit suicide a dozen times, according to his attorneys. He doesn't want his death sentence contested, he says, because he wants to die.
He would become the ninth "volunteer" in the prison's death chamber. Only one Nevada execution since the death penalty was reinstated 25 years ago has been against the wishes of the condemned.
While some would label these as assisted suicides, they are not. That choice, like many others, has been taken away from the residents of Death Row. There would be far more irony in keeping them alive than there is in carrying out the penalty prescribed for them by law.
As for executions of the mentally ill, there may be circumstances in which the murderer is so incompetent that he didn't understand the consequences of his actions.
The closest case in recent years may have been Alvaro Calambro, whose child-like intelligence would be pitied - except for the fact he drove a tire iron through the skull of a young woman.
Dennis, now 57, doesn't fit that category. He may be crazy, but he made plenty of choices in his life. Most of them involved drugs and alcohol. Most of them were wrong.
At a hearing to determine his mental competency, Dennis told a federal judge: "I took a life and I'm ready to pay for that with mine."
Fair enough.
