Today's Austin American-Statesman carries Michael Graczyk's AP report, "After 33 years in Texas prisons, Huntsville warden done."
For about 140 people in the past six years, the soft Texas drawl of Charles Thomas O'Reilly was the last voice they heard before they died.
O'Reilly retired Monday from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit, where he presided over more lethal injections than any other warden. He says he leaves with no reservations, no nightmares.
"I don't have any intentions of changing my mind, reflecting on how could I have ever done this stuff," he said of the execution duty, which began for him in September 2004 when he took over the 1,700-inmate penitentiary in downtown Huntsville that is more than a century and a half old. "If you think it's a terrible thing, you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. You don't do 140 executions and then all of a sudden think this was a bad thing."
O'Reilly, who turned 60 Wednesday , retired after more than 33 years with the Texas prison agency. On his last day as warden, he looked as if he were straight out of Central Casting : burly, white-haired and in jeans, a western-style belt with a star dominating the buckle and a black shirt.
He didn't keep an exact tally of the number of inmates he stood over as they were strapped to the gurney and prepared for injection. The estimated 140 inmates whose executions he oversaw account for about a third of the 463 put to death since Texas resumed capital punishment in 1982.
Some left an impression, although the only name that came immediately to mind for O'Reilly was Frances Newton, who in 2005 became the third woman executed in Texas in modern times. She was the only woman executed on O'Reilly's watch.
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