"Former CA Prison Warden Tapped as a Leader of Anti-Death Penalty Movement," is the title of a news release issued this morning by Death Penalty Focus. Here's the entire release:
Jeanne Woodford, former Undersecretary and Director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and Warden of San Quentin State Prison, has been selected as the new executive director of Death Penalty Focus, board president Mike Farrell announced today. San Quentin houses California’s death row and Woodford, a 33-year veteran of corrections and law enforcement, oversaw four executions as warden.
“After each execution, I faced the reality that I had not made the world any safer. The death penalty is a failed public policy and I am committed to spending the rest of my career working to end this costly and ineffective practice,” said Ms. Woodford. “The death penalty fails to serve victims’ families, does not keep the public safer than the alternative of life without the possibility of parole, inflicts unnecessary stress and trauma on prison personnel, and drains taxpayer resources that could be better spent providing crucial services to homicide victims’ families.”
Founded in 1988, Death Penalty Focus is one of the largest nonprofit advocacy organizations in the nation dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment. Ms. Woodford will focus attention on building Death Penalty Focus’ programs that give voice to law enforcement officers, victims’ family members, the wrongfully convicted, and people of faith in opposing the death penalty.
“Jeanne Woodford will lead the death penalty abolition movement at a pivotal moment in our nation’s history. With public support for capital punishment eroding, and growing numbers of states considering repeal legislation, Ms. Woodford will be a central figure in hastening the day when the death penalty is recognized as a relic of a bygone era,” said Mr. Farrell.
Four states (Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey, and New York) have abolished the death penalty in four years, bringing the number of states that do not have the death penalty to 16, along with the District of Columbia. Bills to abolish the death penalty are under consideration in Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas with support from Republican and Democratic legislators, law enforcement officers, victims’ family members, and growing numbers of the general public.
“As a veteran of law enforcement and a cabinet-level state official, Jeanne Woodford has a unique perspective on the policies needed to keep families safe and use tax dollars most efficiently. As the warden of San Quentin, Ms. Woodford speaks with unique authority and first-hand experience about the risks of executing the innocent and the failure of the death penalty in California to bring resolution to many victims or deter crime," said Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project and Professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
California, where more than 700 men and women are on death row, has not conducted an execution since January, 2006 due to challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocols. A 2010 Lake Research Partners poll showed that a clear majority of voters nationwide (61%) and in California (62%) would prefer a punishment other than the death penalty for first-degree murder. A recent poll by David Binder Research found that 63% California voters would support converting the sentences of everyone on death row in California to life without the possibility of parole to save the state more than $1 billion in five years.
Ms. Woodford succeeds Lance Lindsey, who is credited with quadrupling the organization’s membership during his 16-year tenure, leading Death Penalty Focus to become, as Human Rights Watch recently noted, “one of the premier organizations seeking to abolish the death penalty by educating and mobilizing the public, and ensuring that the use of this arbitrary and barbaric practice receives the intense critical scrutiny that it deserves.”
Ms. Woodford will be making her first public appearance on May 12th at DPF’s Annual Awards Dinner in Beverly Hills. Details:
Read Ms. Woodford’s bio.
Read Ms. Woodford’s opinion editorial in The Los Angeles Times, “California Warden Now Believes that Executions Don’t Make Us Safer,”
Read a profile of Ms. Woodford in The New York Times Magazine.
"Former California prisons leader joins fight against death penalty," is the Los Angeles Times news article written by Carol J. Williams. Here's an extended excerpt from the beginning of the report:
As the clock ticked past midnight and the death chamber phone refused to ring, San Quentin State Prison Warden Jeanne Woodford would calmly signal the executioners to inject a lethal dose of chemicals into the condemned man's veins.
Reared in a Roman Catholic family, she grew up believing that only God had the right to take a life. But four times in her 30-year career in California corrections, the soft-spoken mother of five carried out executions of notorious killers, remorseful and unrepentant alike.
Woodford resigned as director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation four years ago, dismayed over state authorities' clinging to policies such as the death penalty that she had concluded are wasteful, discriminatory and fail to make the public safer.
Now, as the state tries to restart the execution machinery after a five-year legal hiatus, Woodford has crossed to the other side of the contentious debate over capital punishment. On Thursday, the abolitionist nonprofit Death Penalty Focus will announce Woodford's appointment as executive director, a new role that will see her standing on the other side of the walls of San Quentin should any of the 713 death row inmates meet his or her end at the hands of the state.
"I never was in favor of the death penalty, but my experience at San Quentin allowed me to see it from all points of view. I had a duty to carry out, and I tried to do it with professionalism," Woodford, 56, said in explaining how she had to put her personal abhorrence of execution aside to do her job. "The death penalty serves no one. It doesn't serve the victims. It doesn't serve prevention. It's truly all about retribution."
Woodford says she sees an opportunity to get rid of the death penalty in the current quest for budgetary restraint. If the public can be educated about the true costs of capital punishment — at least $200 million a year, she says — as well as its potential for irreversible error, support for the ultimate penalty would wither, Woodford predicts. It is that prospect that has lured her from a brief retirement to the post with Death Penalty Focus from which she will lobby against the policy she once imposed.
"There comes a time when you have to ask if a penalty that is so permanent can be available in such an imperfect system," she says of the mounting instances elsewhere in the country of death row inmates being exonerated by DNA evidence. "The only guarantee against executing the innocent is to do away with the death penalty."
Executions were few and far between during her years at San Quentin, and Woodford focused her attention on the goal of rehabilitation, preparing those with prospects for release to live within the law once they got outside. San Quentin — its storied ocher fortress on a promontory above San Francisco Bay and nestled amid some of the most liberal communities in the country — gained a reputation as a leading progressive penal institution in the years she was there.
Built by inmates housed on a ship until the first wing opened in 1852, San Quentin was one of the first prisons to create an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, Woodford recalls, and was able to harness the altruism and energy of volunteer counselors and teachers to augment the corrections department's meager rehabilitation resources. In the 1980s and '90s, inmates earned their GEDs, college degrees and trade skills, and aspired to finish their time in the Success Dorm, the re-entry program that would prepare them for life when they got out.
But as she made her way up the ranks, Woodford became increasingly troubled by the state's embrace of capital punishment, restored as a sentencing option in 1978, the year she arrived at San Quentin with a freshly printed degree in criminal justice from Sonoma State University. Though it would be more than a decade before the first of 13 executions was carried out, she watched with dismay as the political football of capital punishment was tossed among tough-on-crime candidates for county district attorney offices and the statehouse.
It was the third of the four executions during her tenure as warden, the 2001 lethal injection of Robert Lee Massie, that brought her to see the death penalty as a failed policy draining funds better used elsewhere. Massie, sentenced to death a second time after his first capital conviction was commuted in 1974, had been a victim of abuse in the state's foster care system, mistreatment born of dwindling state funding and oversight that set him on a path of destruction, she said.
After 26 years at San Quentin, Woodford was tapped by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to serve as corrections director in 2004, a job she initially hoped would allow her to reform the system from inside. She wanted to close the revolving door of parole violators flooding the prisons for three-month terms, enough to compound overcrowding and soak up medical care but too short to get into rehabilitative programs.
"It was an incredibly expensive bus ride to nowhere," she said of the vicious circle of petty offenses sending parolees back inside to reconnect with hardened criminals.
Earlier coverage from California begins at the link.
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