Unlike most death row inmates, Scott Raymond Dozier wanted to die.

Convicted of the 2002 killing and dismemberment of a Las Vegas man, Mr. Dozier waited for years while his lawyers appealed his death sentence. But he found the wait more agonizing than the prospect of execution. Two years ago he abandoned their efforts and urged a judge to set a date.

The state of Nevada pressed to execute him, too, in a new lethal injection chamber. Still, the delays continued, the last six months ago. Mr. Dozier grew increasingly despondent, those who knew him said Monday.

On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Dozier, 48, threaded a bedsheet through an air vent in his cell at the state prison in Ely, Nev., and hanged himself, prison officials said, ending one of the most significant and bizarre death penalty cases in recent years, one that highlighted the contradictions and shifting politics of modern capital punishment in America.

“The prospect of eking out his existence on death row for the rest of his life was unfathomable to him,” said Edgar Barens, a filmmaker who had spent time with Mr. Dozier for a documentary that is still in progress about families affected by death penalty cases.

Instead, Mr. Dozier had insisted he wanted to die even if it meant a long and potentially excruciating death from a cocktail of lethal-injection drugs that included fentanyl. But in the end, his execution was delayed after a drug company intervened, saying that it would suffer grave reputational harm if its products were used in the execution against its wishes. A lawyer representing Nevada warned that if these sorts of lawsuits could be filed, it could end the state’s death penalty altogether.

And a state judge chastised the state officials for operating in bad faith, finding that prison officials had used “subterfuge” to get those drugs in the first place, after failing to obtain them legitimately.

During all of this, as Mr. Dozier sat in prison, Nevada voters elected a new attorney general, a Democrat who was sworn in on Monday, who has declined to say whether he would even continue the state’s legal fight to execute Mr. Dozier.

To some experts, Mr. Dozier’s case highlighted an aspect of the modern death penalty as its popularity wanes in many quarters: The relative frequency of executions of so-called volunteers, or those who abandon their appeals and embrace their sentences.

Nearly nine of 10 condemned inmates who agree to forgo their appeals have shown substantial evidence of mental illness, according to Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington nonprofit that tracks executions.

Mr. Dozier’s case was concerning, he said, because any decision by an inmate to waive death-penalty appeals is not voluntary if they are mentally ill or if it came about because of the effect of the conditions of confinement. Mr. Dozier’s competency did not appear to be an issue in the court process.

“By his volunteering for execution and forcing the issue, Nevada had to come up with execution drugs, and they engaged in a pattern of lies and subterfuge in order to do that,” Mr. Dunham said.

A prison spokeswoman said Mr. Dozier was alone in his cell and not on suicide watch at the time of his death, but state officials said he had threatened to kill himself before and had tried to obtain drugs or razors that he could use to take his life.

Still, some who knew him said they were surprised that he would do so, particularly since a botched attempt more than a decade ago had left him in a coma.

“He was concerned that he wouldn’t do it properly, so that’s why he was pretty set in the state following through with the execution,” said one of his lawyers, Tom Ericsson of Oronoz & Ericsson, a Las Vegas firm.

That Nevada might never set an execution date weighed heavily on Mr. Dozier in recent months, Mr. Ericsson continued, adding that his client’s mental health had deteriorated after the delays and after being frequently kept in isolation or on suicide watch.

“He was just beat down by the prison system,” he said, “and ready to call it a day.”

Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers criminal justice, agreed that it was surprising that Mr. Dozier would take his own life.

“The experience was so awful he could never fathom doing it again,” said Mr. Chammah, who interviewed Mr. Dozier many times and wrote a profile about his case last year. But, he continued, “there’s definitely a part of me that feels like he got the last word in all of this.”

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