"But we have a prisoner who desperately wants to die, and if we wanted to kill him we would have to keep trying drastic and awful-sounding measures until we found one that worked. Yeah. And the other thorny PR problem is that any hint he might have been given a chance to escape could send a mild panic around, and actually letting him escape is pretty likely to start a major one, even if 'letting him escape' means something like 'throwing him into a volcano' where we took him out of his cell to kill him but can't verify that he actually died."