inquiry by the jury regarding what life imprisonment meant. French had his third trial in 1965. All three trials involved French making a full, voluntary, and eager confession to Shelton's murder and giving the exact same reason each time. Each trial ended with a death sentence. The third was the only one that was not successfully appealed, largely because French himself wrote to the Oklahoma Courts of Appeal asking them to reject all future legal efforts made on his behalf to save his life, and the Court of Appeals obliged him. During his time on death row, psychiatric tests revealed that French was of above average intelligence. Unlike most death row inmates, French had completed high school and two years of post-secondary education at college. He was also the author of a book on crime compulsion called We. The tests also revealed that French had long been suicidal, with one psychiatrist writing that French had "seriously attempted suicide several times in the past but always 'chickened out' at the last minute. His basic (and obviously abnormal) motive in murdering his inoffensive cellmate was to force the state to deliver to him the electrocution to which he felt entitled and which he deeply desired." Execution and last words At the time of French's execution, the death penalty was at a near standstill nationwide as a result of changing sentiments towards the death penalty. Oklahoma's last execution before French's was that of Richard Dare, who died in the electric chair on June 1, 1963. Dare was executed for murdering his father-in-law and notably spent 717 days awaiting execution after his death sentence, which was unusually long for the time. Dare was executed only after a protracted legal struggle. Charles Owens was quoted as saying, almost two decades after French's execution, that had French not aggressively pursued his own death, he likely never would have been executed because of the Furman v. Georgia ruling that was to come six years after French's execution, a ruling that would see the U.S. Supreme Court place a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty and see every state forced to re-sentence all condemned inmates to life imprisonment. French's psychiatrist, upon reflecting on the crimes that sent French to the death chamber, also wrote that "[i]f Oklahoma had not had the death penalty, it is likely that both of the men murdered by James French would still be