I originally asked this over on Worldbuilding, was told it was a good question but not a good fit for their space, so I'll see if I get any bites here. I'll give you the TL;DR up front, and then explain why I'm asking for anyone who wants more reading material.
What legal options are generally available in U.S. death-penalty jurisdictions, to a party other than a condemned inmate or their legal counsel, to stop the inmate's execution without requiring that inmate's cooperation or consent? More specifically, is there a U.S. state in which such options are particularly limited?
To elaborate, this is a story idea. The setup is that a person has been convicted of murder and condemned to death, and as of the start of the narrative, the clock is winding down toward the scheduled execution date. With just a few days remaining, the "victim" turns up, either alive or much more recently deceased, after having faked their death. When this revelation becomes public, the calls to halt the execution are naturally raised in earnest. However, the condemned person refuses to challenge their own conviction or sentence, disavows any assistance of legal counsel, and challenges any effort to aid them on procedural grounds.
Why the condemned person would fight for their own death is a fair question; of a few plausible reasons, the one I want to play with in the story is the basic fact that the condemned person's life will have been thoroughly destroyed in all possible ways over the last 20 years. Divorced, destitute, shunned by family, friends and society in general, their youth and health lost forever. It would not be wholly unreasonable for our protagonist to try to force the State to make good on the death warrant, as both an end to the suffering and a general middle finger.
The conundrum presented here turns on the basic rules of "standing", that the courts do not entertain business from just anyone, a plaintiff must have cause to bring action. In this case, that person is our condemned protagonist; in theory, nobody else, per the typical three-prong test, has cause to stand in front of a judge and argue for overturning or modifying the judgment or sentence. With the defendant uncooperative and even hostile, the Honorable Mister Google Esq. is mute on any other option for a third party to bring the matter before a judge, that couldn't be challenged (including by the condemned) on grounds the party lacks proper standing to bring such action.
The core question is whether legal bloggers would tear apart the premise of an eventual written piece based on some day-1-of-law-school concept or procedure not mentioned here. If, in real life, the prosecutor (or some legal rando) could see the story in the morning paper, get an ex parte hearing with a judge at 9 AM, and by sundown the exoneree would be given a gentle push out the front gate in borrowed clothes, then the story's not worth writing.
The idea is appealing because, on its face, there's no such procedure, which would leave the state with no choice but to execute the condemned person, and then to explain to the public why the laws of a putatively just, democratic society required killing a man for a crime that didn't even happen.
