{"pk":59741,"title":"\"I am Worthy of Death:\" The Uses and Abuses of Dignitary Arguments","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Since the U.S. Supreme Court in \nGregg v. Georgia\n reinstated the death penalty in 1976, approximately ten percent of those executed in the United States have been \"volunteers.\" Volunteers are death-sentenced individuals who waive their right to appellate review and post-conviction relief to seek prompt \"voluntary\" execution. Fewer than one in six death sentences result in execution. Volunteers distort this statistic. Many states continue to accede to volunteers' death wishes, often citing the individual's \"dignity\" as a reason for granting them execution. Volunteers similarly  argue that their \"worth\" and \"dignity\" depend on the state executing them. This is the volunteer paradox: Death-sentenced individuals waive dignity-enhancing procedures (like appellate review). This Article lays out the dignitary interests at stake, consciously juxtaposing death row volunteerism against physician-assisted suicide. Whether states have a constitutional obligation to prevent volunteering would be a case of first impression for the U.S. Supreme Court. This Article argues that when the volunteering dilemma reaches the Court, volunteering must be declared unconstitutional based on both dignitary and legal considerations.\nDeath row is a crucible of dignity lashes. Death row volunteerism thus presents a unique and extreme paradigm to wade into the larger \"dignity in the law\" debate. On one side of the debate are dignity skeptics who believe dignity can only be thematic dicta in jurisprudence because dignity is too fragile and subjective of a concept to be operational in the law. On the other side are dignity proponents who argue dignity can and should be part of a judge's assessment. This Article ultimately advances the use of dignity in the law, providing normative arguments for prioritizing certain conceptions of dignity over others and outlining the kinds of dignitary arguments judges should embrace, as well as those they should reject.","language":"en","license":null,"keywords":[],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k02q9zx","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Chloe","middle_name":"","last_name":"Metz","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":""}],"date_submitted":"2025-10-20T15:19:36Z","date_accepted":"2025-10-20T15:19:36Z","date_published":"2025-01-01T00:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/uclalaw_cjlr/article/59741/galley/45701/download/"}]}