"Jeanne Woodford: ardent foe of the death penalty," is the title of Kevin Fagan's San Francisco Chronicle profile.
As she made her way up Market Street the other day on a tea break from her new job as head of the most prominent anti-death penalty organization in California, Jeanne Woodford strode slowly, shoulders hunched. Stylish in a collarless black pantsuit hung loosely around her slight frame, she emanated none of the toughness that a prison guard adopts to deal with hard-case inmates.
But a look into those brown eyes reveals the steel that made her one of the first female cellblock guards at San Quentin State Prison, the first female warden there in 1999, and then head of California's prison system from 2004 to 2006.
The steel is in a gaze so steady her head barely moves as she bores in on even slight points of conversation. And it's in her carefully delivered, low-toned voice, the kind that demands attention from across a room.
It's easy to see why Woodford earned a reputation as a guard who could stop fights with her words alone, and never had to swing her baton - even though she says she preferred running counseling sessions to staffing a gun tower.
And it's easy to see how she was able to give the orders at four executions for her staff to begin pumping deadly chemicals into a condemned man's veins, even as she longed to work one day to make sure nobody else would ever have to give those orders again.
That day came May 12, when Death Penalty Focus announced her appointment as executive director.
And:
"I am anything but soft on crime," she said. "I absolutely think people should be accountable for their crimes. But executing people is not the right way.
"It's totally about retribution, and that serves no one."
Earlier coverage of Woodford begins at the link.
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