The Volunteer

Auteur

Gianna Toboni is an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. Formerly a senior correspondent and producer for VICE News, Toboni has covered escalating cartel violence and political corruption in Mexico, interviewed ISIS fighters, tracked down Nigerian pirates on their illegal oil refineries, and more. She received a GLAAD Media Award for her coverage of the battle between religious and LGBTQ rights in America, a Webby Award for Best Documentary Series, and was recognized by the Newswomen’s Club of New York at the Front Page Awards for her reporting on transgender youth. Toboni was named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list for Media, is a TEDx speaker, and Peabody finalist. The Volunteer is her first book.

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A riveting account of one death row inmate’s quest to die—and a fearless look at how America’s system of punishment 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.