HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) – Shortly after his third suicide attempt, serial killer Michael Ross wrote that life on death row was increasingly unbearable.

He described the isolation of sitting in his cell 23 hours each day for years as he braced for his elusive execution amid the endless noises of slamming metal. He could not escape the dark thoughts of his own horrific crimes and envisioned his own execution in which he would float over the prison.

“I’ve been doing this for 19 years now, – 16 on death row – and it gets harder every year,” Ross wrote in 2003, according to court papers. “I honestly don’t think I can do much more of this. I now understand why 12 percent of the men executed in this country were men who gave up their appeals and volunteered’ for execution.”

Ross’ execution was delayed again Monday to allow a hearing to determine if he is competent or suffers from “Death Row Syndrome.” Public defenders argue that years of harsh conditions on death row have in effect coerced Ross to drop his appeals and agree to become the first person executed in New England since 1960.

Last year, 16 percent of the 59 people executed in the United States had waived appeals, up from the historic average of about 11 percent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

“It keeps going up and up,” said David Elliot, spokesman for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “The desolate conditions of death row lend themselves to both mental illness and a sense of hopelessness and despair.”

Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University, said three prisoners she visited on death row all changed their minds about dropping their appeals. One man in Tennessee had a serious brain injury, she said.

“He said he wanted to die because of the conditions there,” Lewis said.

Another inmate said he really wanted to see his mother, but she would only visit him if he was about to be executed, Lewis said.

Ross, a 45-year-old Cornell University graduate, has confessed to eight murders in eastern Connecticut and New York in the early 1980s.

A state psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Norko, previously declared Ross competent to decide to die. But Norko now believes that he may have come to a different conclusion had he had access to Ross’ writings.

Attorney’s for Ross’ father said they also have evidence of his incompetence, including letters from a retired deputy warden and a prisoner who knew Ross.

“I can best describe Northern as living in a submarine or a cave,” John Tokarz, the former deputy warden, wrote. “On many occasions it was suggested that department staff assigned to Northern should be rotated every two years because of the affect the conditions of Northern could have on their mental health.”

The prisoner, Ramon Lopez, said he believes state mental health workers may have coerced Ross to drop his appeals.

T. R. Paulding Jr., Ross’ attorney, sought the delay after U.S. District Court Judge Robert Chatigny repeatedly warned him on Friday to take the new evidence seriously.

State officials reject the claims and said they are disturbed by Chatigny’s involvement. Other judges have found Ross competent and Chatigny’s stay of the execution was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, they noted.

“Certainly, we would very vigorously contest that there is a death row syndrome or a segregated housing syndrome that affects all death row prisoners and makes them incompetent to voluntarily, knowingly, intelligently, waive their rights,” said state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Death row inmates often “volunteer” for execution to regain control of their fate, Dr. Stuart Grassian, an expert in death row inmates, said in court papers filed by the public defenders.

“The conditions of confinement are so oppressive, the helplessness endured in the roller coaster of hope and despair so wrenching and exhausting, that ultimately the inmate can no longer bear it, and then it is only in dropping his appeals that he has any sense of control over his fate,” Grassian wrote.

Ross sobbed and breathed heavily when he learned in November that his execution would be delayed, according to court papers.

In a June, 2003 letter, he called the experience “a never ending merry-go-round, a horrible ride that never ever stops.”

“People show more mercy to a rabid dog, for at least they take him behind the barn and put a bullet in his head, instead of locking him in a cage and torturing him for years on end,” Ross wrote.

Ross has testified that he wants to expedite his execution to spare the families of his eight victims further pain. But has written that there are other motives.

“…the truth is I was driven more by a desire to end my own pain than out of a noble cause,” Ross wrote in 1998. “However, I knew that I couldn’t say that publicly, so I denied my own desire to leave this world and played on the noble cause of protecting the families of my victims.”