Brandi Grissom posts, "Looking Back on a Life as a Death House Warden," at the Texas Tribune.
Jim Willett never hit anyone in his life, never even wanted to hurt anyone. But at the height of his career, the mild-mannered, white-haired man with reading glasses perched on the end of his nose was responsible for carrying out 89 executions.
“I think if I had my choice, growing up, I’d have been a farmer,” said the former warden of the state’s notoriously active death house.
Willett had not intended to spend the better part of his adult life working in Texas’ sprawling prison system. But the business student turned prison guard found a comfortable routine working for 30 years among his colleagues and wards in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Even now, a decade into his retirement, the soft-spoken, grandfatherly figure has a job running the Texas Prison Museum, surrounded by mementos of lives spent behind razor wire, steel bars and thick brick walls. It has been a career less frightening and less dangerous than people imagine, Willett said, and more enjoyable than he had expected.
And:
Willett was promoted to assistant warden and spent more than a decade working at other Texas prisons. Then, in 1998, prison officials asked him to take on one of the highest-profile jobs in the system: senior warden back at the Walls. He declined, knowing what it would entail. “I didn’t want to deal with the executions,” he said.
The job meant a raise, and Willett said he could not reconcile getting paid more to put men to death. When officials called again, though, he capitulated.
“Somebody was going to have to deal with those inmates,” Willett said. “And I felt like those inmates couldn’t have anybody better to deal with than me.”
He oversaw one of the busiest periods in Texas’ death chamber. During the three-year period he was warden, he gave the go-ahead for 89 executions. Willett greeted the condemned when they arrived at the Walls, talked with them about how the process would work, asked about their last statements and tried to fulfill their final requests.
Later, after the inmates were strapped to the gurney and the needles were inserted, Willett stood by, awaiting a prearranged cue that they had finished their last statement. Then, he would give the signal to start the flow of lethal drugs. “It got easier, but it never got to a point I’d call easy,” he said.
After each one, Willett typed up all that had happened that day. “It turned out to be kind of a release,” he said. But he said he did not think about whether Texas should have the death penalty. “If the people of Texas want to have it,” he said, “I’m fine with it.”
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