The StandDown Texas Project

U.S. Execution, European Abolition

That's the title of a New York Times OpEd by Sylvie Kauffmann.  It will appear in tomorrow's print edition.  Kauffmann is the editorial director Le Monde.  Here's the beginning:

When Felix G. Rohatyn went to Paris as the American ambassador in 1997, he expected the most controversial subject he’d face to be the famous French mistrust of “American hegemony.” To his surprise, the No. 1 issue turned out to be the death penalty.

The “enormous revulsion of the French” over the issue, he told me in 2001 after his return to New York, was eye-opening, as was his friendship with Robert Badinter, the French minister of justice who, under President François Mitterrand, led the fight for the abolition of capital punishment in 1981.

“All those demonstrations, in front of the embassy and the consulates, showed how really passionate people were,” Mr. Rohatyn said. “And in the end, I thought they were probably right.”

Two recent magazine articles — one French, the other American — demonstrate that while the issue has not gone away in Paris, it has taken a new turn in the United States. There has been a big change in American attitudes toward capital punishment during the last decade, and Europe has played a part in it.

The American magazine article is Pamela Colloff's Texas Monthly article on former TDCJ spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.

Related posts are in the international and silent actor trauma category indexes.

A Corrections Expert Speaks Against Capital Punishment

Today's Louisville Courier-Journal publishes the OpEd, "Why I'm against death penalty," by Allen Ault.  He's now Dean of the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University.  Here's the beginning of this must-read:

Capital punishment is not a theoretical concept for me. I have murdered five human beings for a state.

At the time of these deaths, I was director of the Georgia Department of Corrections. Ironically, the executions were carried out in the same maximum security prison where I had previously served as warden. As a result of these experiences, I became a strong opponent of capital punishment. I am against the death penalty because:

• It does not act as a deterrent.

• It is costly (for example, California has spent more than $5 billion for 17 executions).

• It is not applied to the most egregious cases.

• The criminal justice system that administers it is extremely imperfect; over the past decade, nearly 150 death row inmates have been exonerated.

• It is illogical for the state to teach citizens not to kill by killing.

The final reason for my opposition is a particularly personal one—the heavy toll capital punishment exacts from the individuals who have to carry out the sanction.

Corrections officials are expected to commit the most premeditated murder imaginable. You follow a policy book and even have rehearsals.

Related posts are in OpEd and silent actor trauma category indexes.

The Trauma to Execution Workers

"The Enforcers of the Death Penalty: How does capital punishment affect the prison guards and wardens tasked with carrying it out?" is by Tolly Moseley at the Atlantic.  It's a must-read:

Unlike other professions that involve death, such as the police force or the military, few corrections officers enter the field with the expectation that they'll eventually have to kill somebody.  On the contrary, many view themselves as protectors.

"We are caretakers for a population of people who instantly go out of sight, out of mind for the general public," says Jennie Lancaster, a retired prison warden with the North Carolina Department of Corrections. In 1984, she oversaw the execution of Velma Barfield, the first woman in 35 years to be executed in the United States and the first to die of lethal injection.

"At job interviews we don't ask things like, 'So how do you feel about wheeling away a body?'" Lancaster says. "But maybe we should. It's not a role many of us picture ourselves playing."

I'm adding a new item to the category index, Silent Actor Trauma.  In the coming days, I'll tag past articles dealing with the trauma of corrections employees who participate in executions.

Jerry Givens' Mission

The Washington Post reports, "Ex-Virginia executioner becomes opponent of death penalty."  It's by Justin Jouvenal.

Jerry Givens executed 62 people.

His routine and conviction never wavered. He’d shave the person’s head, lay his hand on the bald pate and ask for God’s forgiveness for the condemned. Then, he would strap the person into Virginia’s electric chair.

Givens was the state’s chief executioner for 17 years — at a time when the commonwealth put more people to death than any state besides Texas.

“If you knew going out there that raping and killing someone had the consequence of the death penalty, then why are you going to do it?” Givens asked. “I considered it suicide.”

As Virginia executed its 110th person in the modern era last month, Givens prayed for the man, but also for an end to the death penalty. Since leaving his job in 1999, Givens has become one of the state’s most visible — and unlikely — opponents of capital punishment.

His evolution underscores that of Virginia itself and the nation. Although polls show that the majority of state residents still support the death penalty, Virginia has experienced a sea change on capital punishment in recent years that is part of a national trend.

The state has had fewer death sentences over the past five years than any period since the 1970s. Robert Gleason, who was put to death Jan. 16, was the first execution in a year and a half. As recently as 1999, the state put 13 to death in a single year.

Earlier coverage of Jerry Givens begins at the link.

Jeanne Woodford on California Prop 34

"Former warden says California can’t afford death penalty," is by Mary Duan in the Monterey County Weekly.

From the time a death penalty case enters the court system in California, the count begins. There’s an estimated $40 million a year spent on death penalty cases at the county court level. Then $72 million a year goes for housing death penalty inmates in state prison. Another $58 million is spent on appealing death penalty cases to the state appellate court, and then $14 million is spent on federal appeals, including those that make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

To put it more simply, as U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur Alarcon and Loyola Law School Professor Paula Mitchell did in a 2011 report titled “Executing the Will of the Voters: A Roadmap to Mend or End the California Legislature’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Death Penalty Debacle,” it’s cost $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since California’s reinstated the death penalty in 1978.

Do the math: It’s slightly more than $4 billion spent on executing 13 people. And 725 inmates currently sit on death row. Do the math on that.

Jeanne Woodford knows the numbers intimately, but she knows another set of numbers just as well: 30-60 days. That’s the time she had, from the day a death warrant was signed by the governor to the actual night of an execution, to prepare her staff to kill an inmate at San Quentin State Prison, home to California’s death row.

And:

“I think it’s important to know we have a criminal justice problem in this state and the facts speak for themselves,” Woodford says. “Science tells you the best way to prevent crime is to solve it.” Instead of spending billions on a handful of people who, without the death penalty, will still die in prison with sentences of life without the possibility of parole, Woodford says a fraction of that $4 billion could go toward better policing.

“If you don’t have police on the streets and you’re not solving crime,” she says, “it makes us all less safe.”

Earlier coverage of Prop 34, the SAFE California ballot initiative, begins at the link.

Former Corrections Workers Speaking Up

AFP posts, "Ex-jailers become US anti-death penalty advocates," by Chantal Valery.  It's datelined Washington. Here's an extended excerpt:

"I can see their faces in my nightmares," said Allen Ault, a former Georgia prison warden among a growing number of ex-jailers and executioners opposed to the death penalty in the United States.

Across the country, prison workers who once supported the death penalty are beginning to lend their voices, alongside other prominent figures, to the campaign to abolish capital punishment in favor of life imprisonment.

In his role as the director of the Georgia Department of Corrections in the 1990s, Ault supervised five executions in a death row that he had built 20 years earlier.

Ault would give the order to pull the switch on death row inmates strapped to an electric chair.

It is "the most premeditated murder that one can do, there's no other way to describe it," Ault said, calling putting inmates to death an "inhumane job for people who have a conscience and who value life."

He was among six retired prison wardens who urged Georgia officials -- in vain -- to try to halt the execution of Troy Davis, an African American who was put to death in September for killing a white off-duty police officer in 1989.

During his career as Florida prison system warden, Ron McAndrew escorted three prisoners to the electric chair, and five others to the death chamber in Texas to be executed by lethal injection.

One day in 1997, the Florida electric chair, known as "Old Sparky," malfunctioned. "We had a fire, it was horrible -- we literally burnt him to death," said McAndrew.

McAndrew is still tormented by memories of telling the technician to continue with the electric charge despite the mishap.

"This work is too dirty, we have become barbarians," he told AFP.

Reginald Wilkinson, who once served as director of Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said "it's time... to evolve to a sophisticated society that would allow that life without parole would be a punishment equal to capital punishment."

"I had the responsibility to carry out the law," said Wilkinson, who eventually became an anti-death penalty activist.

Prosecutors, governors -- such as Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon -- and even judges, such as Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and fellow retired justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor, are raising doubts about the death penalty.

"We see new voices, we've seen much change in the leadership, more people are speaking up," said Steve Hall with The StandDown Texas Project, which advocates eliminating the death penalty in the southern state.

According to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, the number of executions and death penalty sentences has dropped 75 percent in the past 15 years to its lowest level since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated in the United States.

And:

"In the US, we have replaced justice with vengeance," said McAndrew. "When it comes to capital punishment, it's very scary, all you need is a person to point his finger at you."

McAndrew still recalls a chance encounter at a Florida airport with a death penalty inmate who had been reprieved and was eventually released.

"He recognized me -- he put his arm around me," said McAndrew. "The last time I saw him, he was in death row in Florida and I was warden.

"I could have possibly extracted this man out of his cell, brought him to the death chamber and put him to death when in fact he was totally innocent. He served almost 20 years for a crime he had not committed."

Earlier coverage of corrections workers voicing their concerns begins at the link.

Corrections Workers & the Death Penalty

"I Committed Murder.  For the anonymous executioners of death row, the ‘high’ of pulling the lever is often followed by a lifetime of doubt," is the title of Michael Daly's Newsweek report.

Only a fellow executioner like 59-year-old Jerry Givens would know how crushingly hard it will continue to be for those who put Troy Davis to death last week even as he continued to insist on his innocence.

“The executioner is the one that suffers,” Givens says on the day after Davis’s execution in Georgia. “The person that carries out the execution itself is stuck with it the rest of his life. He has to wear that burden. Who would want that on them?”

During the 17 years that Givens worked as an executioner in Virginia, he put 62 men to death. And each time, he felt what he calls “the executioner high,” an adrenalized state that always imparted a merciful unreality as he sat behind a curtain and pulled the lever, releasing a fatal cocktail of three drugs that seemed to him less humane than the electricity he previously unleashed by pulling a switch. The chemicals of lethal injection always took eternal minutes longer than the deadly jolt from the electric chair.

Allen Ault writes, "I Ordered Death in Georgia.  The state's former D.O.C. commissioner on 'rehearsed murder,'" also for the current Newsweek.

I can’t always remember their names, but in my nightmares I can see their faces. As the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections from 1992 until 1995, I oversaw five executions. The first two were Thomas Dean Stevens and Christopher Burger, accomplices in a monstrous crime: as teenagers in 1977, they robbed and raped a cabdriver, put him in the trunk of a car, and pushed the vehicle into a pond. I had no doubt that they were guilty: they admitted it to me. But now it was 1993 and they were in their 30s. All these years later, after a little frontal-lobe development, they were entirely different people.

On execution days, I always drove from Atlanta to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. I knew death row well: 20 years earlier, I had built it. The state had hired me as the warden of Georgia Diagnostic in 1971, where I renovated a special cell block for especially violent offenders. After I left Georgia in 1977, the state reinstated the death penalty and turned the cell block I had developed into death row.

The state executed Stevens first, in June 1993, and then Burger in December. In both instances, I visited them in a cell next to the electric-chair chamber, where they counted down the hours until they died. They were calm, mature, and remorseful. When the time came, I went to a small room directly behind the death chamber where the attorney general worked the phones, checking with the courts to make sure that the executions were not stayed. Then we asked the prisoners for their final words. Stevens said nothing, and Burger apologized, saying, “Please forgive me.” I looked to the prison electrician and ordered him to pull the switch. Last Wednesday, as the state of Georgia prepared to execute Troy Davis despite concerns about his guilt, I wrote a letter with five former death-row wardens and directors urging Georgia prison officials to commute his sentence. I feared not only the risk of Georgia killing an innocent man, but also the psychological toll it would exact on the prison workers who performed his execution. “No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt,” we wrote in our letter.

And:

When I was required to supervise an execution, I tried to rationalize my work by thinking, if I just save one future victim, maybe it is worth it. But I was very aware of the research showing that the death penalty wasn’t a deterrent. I left my job as corrections commissioner in Georgia in 1995 partially because I had had enough: I didn’t want to supervise the executions anymore. My focus changed to national crime policy and then to academia, where I could work to improve the criminal-justice system without participating in its worst parts. Today, I am the dean of the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University.

"Wardens Who Protested Troy Davis’s Execution: A Rare Breed," is the title of Greg Mitchell's post at the Nation.  It's also available at Huffington Post.

In the waning hours of protests against the execution on Troy Davis by the state of Georgia last Wednesday, one action drew particular notice: a group of six former wardens and correctional officials pleading for clemency and suggesting that prison staffers be allowed to refuse to take part in the death process.

"While most of the prisoners whose executions we participated in accepted responsibility for the crimes for which they were punished,” the wardens’ statement read, “some of us have also executed prisoners who maintained their innocence until the end. It is those cases that are most haunting to an executioner….

“Living with the nightmares is something that we know from experience. No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt. Should our justice system be causing so much harm to so many people when there is an alternative?”

The letter by former corrections officials is available via the Southern Center for Human Rights.  It was noted earlier,

We write to you as former wardens and corrections officials who have had direct involvement in executions. Like few others in this country, we understand that you have a job to do in carrying out the lawful orders of the judiciary. We also understand, from our own personal experiences, the awful lifelong repercussions that come from participating in the execution of prisoners. While most of the prisoners whose executions we participated in accepted responsibility for the crimes for which they were punished, some of us have also executed prisoners who maintained their innocence until the end. It is those cases that are most haunting to an executioner.

We write to you today with the overwhelming concern that an innocent person could be executed in Georgia tonight. We know the legal process has exhausted itself in the case of Troy Anthony Davis, and yet, doubt about his guilt remains. This very fact will have an irreversible and damaging impact on your staff. Many people of significant standing share these concerns, including, notably, William Sessions, Director of the FBI under President Ronald Reagan.

Living with the nightmares is something that we know from experience. No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt. Should our justice system be causing so much harm to so many people when there is an alternative? 

We urge you to ask the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reconsider their decision. Should that fail, we urge  you to unburden yourselves and your staff from the pain of participating in such a questionable execution to the extent possible  by allowing any personnel so inclined to opt-out of activities related to the execution of Troy Anthony Davis. Further, we urge you to provide appropriate counseling to personnel who do choose to perform their job functions related to the execution. If we may be of assistance to you moving forward, please do not hesitate to call upon any of us.

Respectfully and collegially,

Allen Ault – Retired Warden, Georgia Diagnostic & Classifications Prison
Terry Collins – Retired Director, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
Ron McAndrew – Retired Warden, Florida State Prison
Dennis O’Neill - Retired Warden, Florida State Prison
Reginald Wilkinson – Retired Director, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
Jeanne Woodford – Retired Warden, San Quentin State Prison

In the as Vegas Sun, Bradley D. Chapline writes, "Davis should not have been executed."

Before retiring, I guarded inmates for three decades. I am a proponent in most cases of the death penalty — when the inmate through all his appeals has been clearly shown to be guilty beyond “any shadow” of a doubt. I’m not talking about “beyond a reasonable doubt,” as is the case in reaching a conviction. The doubt factor has to be extremely intensified to justify execution. This was not the case with Georgia inmate Troy Davis.

In executing Davis, the American justice system has committed a fatal mistake. I’m certainly not saying that Davis was innocent. However, there existed sufficient doubt to this conviction. Therefore, this makes the American justice system guilty of executing a man who may have been innocent of his conviction.

Earlier coverage of Troy Davis' execution begins at the link.

A Profile of Jeanne Woodford

"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.

Profile of an Executioner

Australia's Sydney Morning Herald has a profile of Jerry Givens, a former Virginia prison guard and executioner.  "Cruel and unusual punishment," is written by Jeff Sparrow.

He told no one about what he did: not his wife, not his friends, no one. "I had to change. You've got to be transformed to take a life, to become - I hate to say an animal - but a person that you are really not. You are tense. You go up and down. Is the execution going ahead? Will they get a temporary stay?

"It takes a while to come down afterwards. It might take two days. It might take three days. It might take months. And some time you go up and down after that anyway, and then when you got another one scheduled, you got to get ready to do that all over again.

"And then you try to live a normal life."

He tells of his family problems, the troubles he had at home, how his wife had to cope with the moods he could not explain, and how the executions kept coming.

Are there any in particular that he thinks about, I ask.

"Sometimes, they say things that will stay with you the rest of your life," he says, his voice flat. "We had a guy in a wheelchair. You got to pick him up, his legs dangling, put him in an electric chair. You got guys complaining about their veins; you can't find a vein, you're hurting him, he's going through pain. It locks in and stays with you, and any time you hear about executions, these things pop up."

Then there were the families of the condemned men. "This is your last visit with your mother, your sister, your child or whatever and then you have to sit there and you got to watch your son be killed. To bring closure to a family member by killing someone else, it's not ... " His voice fades away and he shakes his head again.

ABC World News profiled Givens on its December 17 broadcast in the report, "Interview With an Executioner."

Jerry Givens spent 17 years as a professional killer. From 1982 to 1999, he killed 62 people.

He was never punished. His work was paid for by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

As the state's chief executioner, Givens pushed the buttons that administered lethal doses of electricity to the condemned. He could even choose how many volts to administer. And he is the first to admit that it was largely guesswork.

"If he was a small guy, I didn't give that much. You try not to cook the body, you know. I hate to sound gross,'' he told ABC News in a rare interview.

Only a handful of executioners in America have ever spoken publicly about their experiences, and fewer, if any, have revealed the emotional toll the job can take on a person or the mind-set of the man behind the proverbial mask.

Givens told ABC News that his experiences in the death chamber have caused him to change course and oppose the death penalty.

And:

Givens said he trained with a Texas execution team that showed him how to administer the deadly cocktail of drugs used in lethal injection executions. Still, he has no formal medical training.

Corrections officials in the 36 states where the death penalty is legal have long faced the vexing challenge of having executions administered, or at the very least overseen, by trained medical professionals. But the Hippocratic oath ("first, do no harm") ethically prohibits medical professionals from participating in executions. The American Medical Association recommends that doctors not participate in executions.

In 2006, lawyers for the state of Missouri told a federal judge that they simply could not meet his demand that a certified anesthesiologist oversee state executions.

State attorneys reportedly told the judge that authorities in Missouri had sent certified letters to 298 qualified anesthesiologists who lived anywhere near the state's death chamber. They were turned down by every single one, according to a report in The New York Times.

Many states have abandoned guidelines requiring medical professionals to perform executions, because there are simply not enough doctors or nurses willing to perform the job. And in states like Virginia, as Givens told ABC News, training for such a consequential job is thin at best.

ABC News showed Givens the American Veterinary Medical Association's guidelines for the lethal injection of pets, which states that the drug used to euthanize an animal can be so potentially painful that "it is utmost importance that personnel performing this technique are trained and knowledgeable in anesthetic techniques, and are competent in assessing anesthetic depth appropriate for administration of potassium chloride intravenously."

Asked whether it concerned him that the nation seems to take more care in the execution of pets than it does in humans, Givens said, simply, "yeah."

"It's wild."