The Volunteer

The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate's Quest to Die with Dignity

Gianna Toboni

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Law
• eBook ISBN:
  9781668033036
• Subtopic: Sentencing
• Index: Law

A riveting account of one inmate’s quest to die on death row—and a fearless look at a system of punishment that has failed the public it claims to serve.

When Scott Dozier was sent to Nevada’s death row in 2007, convicted of a pair of grisly murders, he didn’t cry foul or embark upon a protracted innocence campaign. He sought instead to expedite his execution—to hasten his inevitable death. He decided he would rather face his end swiftly than die slowly in solitary confinement. In volunteering for execution, Dozier may have been unusual. But in the tortuous events that led his death date to be scheduled and rescheduled, planned and then stayed, his time on death row was anything but.

In The Volunteer, Emmy Award–winning investigative reporter Gianna Toboni traces the twists and turns of Dozier’s story, along the way offering a hard look at the history and controversy that surround the death penalty today. Toboni reveals it to be a system rife with black market dealings and supply chain labyrinths, with disputed drugs and botched executions. Today’s death penalty, generally carried out through lethal injection, has proven so cumbersome, ineffective, and potentially harrowing that some states have considered a return to the electric chairs and firing squads of the past, believing those approaches to be not only more effective but more humane.

No matter where you stand on the morality of capital punishment, there’s no denying that the death penalty is failing the American public. With costs running into the billions and countless lives kept in limbo, it has proven incapable of achieving its desired end: executing the inmates that fellow Americans have deemed guilty of the most heinous crimes. With The Volunteer, Toboni offers an insightful and profound look at how the death penalty went so terribly wrong. A spellbinding story down to its shocking conclusion, it brings to light the horrifying realities of state-sanctioned killings—realities that many would prefer to ignore.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Chapter One: The Inmate
• Chapter Two: Innocence
• Chapter Three: A Curious History
• Chapter Four: Innocence Lost
• Chapter Five: The Worst of the Worst
• Chapter Six: The Underworld
• Chapter Seven: Trade You a Beer for a Death Drug
• Chapter Eight: Rock Bottom
• Chapter Nine: The Wild, Wild West
• Chapter Ten: Execution One
• Chapter Eleven: Collateral Damage
• Chapter Twelve: Whitewashing Brutality
• Chapter Thirteen: Fighting to Die
• Chapter Fourteen: A Return to Blatant Brutality
• Chapter Fifteen: Life on Death Row
• Chapter Sixteen: Pulling the Strings
• Chapter Seventeen: Outlawing America’s Death Penalty
• Chapter Eighteen: The New Warden
• Chapter Nineteen: Meeting Dozier
• Chapter Twenty: Execution Part II
• Chapter Twenty-One: An American Love Affair
• Chapter Twenty-Two: The Investigation
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Cruel and Unusual
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The End
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Copyright