[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----TEXAS

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 10


TEXAS:

Widow drops death penalty lawsuit----Had sued judge after she blocked
husband Michael Richard's appeal


The lawsuit filed with great fanfare this week by an executed killer's
widow against a judge for blocking the inmate's last-minute appeal has
been dropped  at least for now.

Civil rights lawyer Randall Kallinen said Friday that the dismissal is
part of his strategy and that Wednesday's news conference at the Houston
federal courthouse was not a publicity stunt.

"I really cannot divulge my strategy right now, but I'm sure it will
become evident in the near future," Kallinen said.

A day after filing, Marsha Richard withdrew the suit, which accused Texas
Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller of causing the
inmate's Sept. 25 lethal injection. The lawsuit said Keller violated
Michael Richard's due process rights when she ordered the court clerk's
office to close promptly at 5 p.m. on Sept. 25 before his lawyers could
file an appeal.

The notice of dismissal, filed Thursday by Kallinen, offers no
explanation. He declined to reveal whether he will file another case.

"I wish I could tell you, but the other side may use anything in the media
to their advantage," he said.

Legal experts said his strategy could range from second thoughts about his
legal theory to displeasure with the assigned judge.

"One reason might be that he realized that it was a frivolous suit and at
some point you'll be sanctioned if you persist in a frivolous suit. He
might have decided he got the publicity he wanted and why not dismiss it
now?" University of Houston law professor Peter Hoffman said.

It would have been less costly to amend the original claim than pay
another $350 civil filing fee, Hoffman added.

"It may be that he's going to reformulate his theory and he's going to try
again, but I think it will be difficult for him to come up with a viable
theory."

South Texas College of Law professor James Paulsen said Kallinen could be
judge shopping or perhaps the case contained an error.

"It may be that what he's doing is taking a free shot at another judge,"
Paulsen said, adding that it may backfire if the court gives him the same
jurist. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon and
was scheduled for an initial conference in March before U.S. Magistrate
Judge Frances Stacy.

Another option involves making public statements about an active lawsuit,
instead of slinging accusations.

"Sometimes you are more protected when you are speaking about something
that is a matter of public record," Paulsen said.

Kallinen had the right to withdraw the case because the other side had not
responded, both experts said.

The lawsuit was filed a day after the state criminal appeals court said it
would accept emergency e-mail filings in death penalty cases to avoid a
repeat of Michael Richard's nationally controversial execution.

On the morning of Sept. 25, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a
challenge to the chemicals used for lethal injections in Kentucky. That
case alleges that the method of execution used in almost every
death-penalty state causes inmates to experience torture.

Throughout the day, Richard's attorneys worked to halt his execution on
the same basis.

The lawsuit claimed Keller's actions denied the condemned man his right to
file a proper request for a stay of execution with the U.S. Supreme Court
because the Court of Criminal Appeals had not had a chance to rule. Three
other state appeals court judges said they were available that evening and
could have handled Richard's appeal if they had known about it. The U.S.
Supreme Court denied the stay request.

Michael Richard, 49, was executed at 8:22 p.m. for the 1986 rape and
murder of a Harris County mother of seven.

Since then, all other executions in the nation have been halted pending
the outcome of the Kentucky case.

(source: Houston Chronicle)

****************************

Saved from execution, convicted killer looks for another miracle


Kenneth Foster, who unexpectedly avoided certain death, believes other
miracles may be headed his way.

"I don't feel I've come this far to stop here," Foster said from the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice McConnell Unit, where he could be held for
the next 3 decades. "I think something more is going to happen... I don't
know where it's going to come from, but I do believe it's going to
happen."

Foster, 31, has reason for an optimistic outlook as the only condemned
Texas inmate to win a commutation from Gov. Rick Perry without the
prodding of a court.

The hours leading up to the news of his commutation were a jumble of fear
and terror, then a sudden turn to surprise, relief and joy.

He was in his cell on death row, expecting the parole board to answer his
plea for mercy two days before his Aug. 30 scheduled execution for being
present at a fatal shooting in San Antonio. Foster claimed he was in the
car when a robbery turned deadly and had no idea his companions intended
to kill anyone.

His death sentence had been the cause of protests  and ultimately the
state's decision to spare him  because he was condemned under the state's
law of parties, where anyone involved in a crime is held equally
responsible regardless of their role.

With less than 24 hours to live, prison officials and a squad of guards
showed up outside his death row cell one evening.

"They asked me to come out," he recalled. "I didn't know what was going
on. As I was coming out, it was like a frenzy out there.

"I laid down on the ground. I told them I'm not going anywhere until you
tell me where we're going. I was supposed to have my last visits the next
day."

Concerned about protests, prison officials altered their usual schedule
and planned to take him early to the death chamber in Huntsville, 45 miles
away. He'd get his final visits with relatives there, they told him.

"I was pretty upset," Foster said. "I couldn't say I trusted their word. I
was calling them terrorists. They were terrorizing me."

He was driven to the Huntsville Unit in a 4-vehicle caravan.

"It's real dark," he said of the holding cell just outside the death
chamber. "It's like a catacomb. It's like a dungeon, almost medieval
like."

The morning of his scheduled execution, he was permitted a visit with his
Dutch wife and an attorney.

His father unexpectedly walked in just before noon.

"He goes: '6-1'. He was ecstatic, crying," Foster said. That was the
parole board vote for commutation.

It "might be your lucky day," a prison official said.

Then the warden walked up, a cell phone in his ear, and told Foster his
sentence was being commuted.

"I said: 'Right now?' He said: 'Right now.'

"I dropped and said a prayer," Foster said. "I was thinking about giving
thanks."

He was whisked back to death row, where a few people he knew offered
congratulations.

"They got me out of there quick," he said. "And I was happy to go, too."

Less than 2 weeks later, he was transferred to the McConnell Unit, his new
home about 100 miles south of San Antonio.

"When I was on death row, I surrounded myself with individuals who thought
more like me. Here, you got a bunch of these young guys. I'm around a lot
more inmates now."

On death row, inmates are in near total isolation, even spending their
daily hour of recreation by themselves. Meals are served in the cells.

Now he gets some meals in a prison day room.

"Even the food is better," he said, reveling over the butter on his
breakfast tray. "I hadn't seen butter for years."

Despite all the publicity over his case, he said there were only a few
inmates and officers here who were aware of his past.

"I'm not so talkative," he said. "It's a positive thing because I like to
stay out of the mix of things."

But when asked about his history, he'll volunteer: "I just got off death
row."

"That's kind of a conversation starter," he laughed.

His new sentence, along with the time he's already been imprisoned, means
he doesn't become eligible for parole until 2036.

"I've been through hell. I know what the worst is like. And I survived
it," he said.

"I'm going to keep fighting, I'm going to keep appealing. I'm looking to
find an appeal if I can. It's going to be kind of hard. I've been through
so many of my appeal processes already."

He said he thinks about Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison in
South Africa "in conditions that we probably couldn't imagine." And of
friends he left behind who have spent decades on death row.

"If I have to do it, I can do it," he said of the years waiting for parole
eligibility while acknowledging a parole is not guaranteed. "I don't want
to. I'm hoping I don't have to."

Foster and a companion, Mauriceo Brown, were tried for the Aug. 15, 1996,
shooting of Michael LaHood on the driveway of LaHood's home in San
Antonio. Foster insisted he was 80 feet away in a car, had no idea Brown
was going to kill LaHood and didn't participate in the shooting.

A Bexar County jury convicted Foster and Brown of capital murder and
sentenced both to death. Brown was executed last year.

Perry, a staunch capital punishment supporter said it was the "right and
just decision" in this case, noting he was troubled that the men were
tried together.

More than 17,000 messages of support for Foster had poured into the
governor and the parole board.

"How can 17,285 people be stupid?" Foster asked. "How could all those
people be wrong?"

12 messages called for his execution, and LaHood's relatives accused Perry
of bowing to political pressure.

"I appreciate it," Foster said of Perry's decision. "He did a good thing."

He said he planned to write Perry and the parole board thank you letters
but his typewriter broke.

"I'm going to do my best to not let these people down," Foster said. "Part
of my campaign was showing not everybody on death row is a monster killer.

"This has a lot to do with pride for me."

(source: Associated Press)

******************************

Former Warden Reconsiders Executions----Jim Willett oversaw 89 executions.
Now, amidst dozens of DNA exonerations, he wonders whether it was right.


Jim Willet was warden of the Walls Unit for 3 years. The executions were
never easy, he says. "The hardest were the young fellows. You think,
there's a young man who ruined someone's life and ruined his own, and he
probably could have really been something."

He's witnessed so many executions, it's hard to remember them all. But
certain memories stand out. There was the man who fought so hard he had to
be restrained and carriedconvulsingto the death chamber. The one who'd
done so many IV drugs the medical team had to shoot the lethal fluids
through a vein in his leg. There was the man who asked to sing "Silent
Night" as his final statement and expired in mid-verse, and the one from
Dallas who followed up a heartfelt apology to the victim's family with an
enthusiastic "How 'bout them Dallas Cowboys!"

Jim Willett is surrounded by such memories as director of the Texas Prison
Museum in Huntsville. From 1998 to 2001, three of the death chamber's
busiest years, he served as warden of the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice's Walls Unit and presided over 89 executions. He was the man who
gave the signal to take an inmate's life.

A straight-shooting 57-year-old, Willett is broad and solidly built, with
clear blue eyes and a bald head ringed with white hair. As a boy growing
up in an East Texas farming town, he dreamed of driving a tractor and
planting crops. Instead, he wound up working in prisons and eventually
found himself overseeing executions. He dreaded that part of the job and
often prayed about it. As many interviews as he's given on the topic and
as much as he's thought about the morality of execution, it's never easy
to put into words what it's like to lead a man into the death chamber,
listen to his last words and then, minutes later, hear him sputter and be
still.

"The first time is unbelievable," he tells me, standing in the museum's
gallery next to a glass case that contains a plastic IV bag and three
large syringes used to inject the deadly chemicals. "You have this healthy
personthis person who was able to just jump up on the gurneyand you've
said, 'Kill this person,' and someone's fixin' to. You're about to put
someone to death in front of all these people. It's an overwhelming
feeling. I can't describe it."

It's a bright fall day in Huntsville, and Willett is preparing for an
afternoon of interviews. A news crew is setting up cameras by one of the
most popular exhibits at the museum"Old Sparky," the decommissioned wooden
electric chair with leather straps. The crew isn't from Houston or Dallas
or even Los Angeles or Chicagoit's from the London-based BBC. Later, a
Russian network will film here too. They've come to report on the free
world's most efficient death chamber, which sits across town in the
towering red brick prison that looms over the quaint storefronts of
Huntsville's Main Street.

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to consider whether lethal injection is
humane and across the country there is talk of freezing executions in the
meantime, the foreign newscasters have come to puzzle over Texas, the
state that has executed nearly half of the 1,099 people put to death in
the United States since 1976. A front-page headline in The Dallas Morning
News this October day reads, "Texas unlikely to halt executions: Some
fault leaders for not following other states with moratoriums."

Willett has grown accustomed to the spotlight. Television trucks and
reporters were constant fixtures in Huntsville during his 30 years in the
prison system, especially the last three, when he was in charge of the
executions.

As Willett speaks in the nearly empty museum, I notice soft music coming
from an exhibit on 1930s chain gangs. "Back is weak and I done got tired,"
sing the low, mournful voices of black prisoners working the fields, their
hoes striking the ground in time. "Boss on a horse and he's watchin' us
all, better tighten up..."

Willett stands next to a sign that tells the history of capital punishment
from the days when the county sheriff conducted public hangings. He points
to a nearby case. Above the syringes is a mug shot of Gary Graham, a
thick-necked black man dubbed Death Row Inmate 696. "That's the one who
fought," Willett says. "There were a couple of others that resisted, but
they didn't fight like he did."

Graham was convicted in 1981 of robbing and killing a man in a
grocery-store parking lot in Houston. He became a symbol for death penalty
opponents, and as his execution date drew near in 2000, celebrities such
as Danny Glover and Bianca Jagger spoke out on his behalf. The day of his
death, the crowd outside the prison included the Reverend Jesse Jackson
and members of the New Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan. After a team
of officers in riot gear carried Graham into the death chamber and
strapped him onto the gurney, he shouted for nearly 10 minutes about how
he never killed anyone and that the government needed to stop killing
black people.

Finally, Willett signaled the executioner and watched as Graham drifted to
sleep in mid-sentence.

As he gazes at the exhibit, which includes a sign that reads "Stop
Executions" and a poster of Karla Faye Tucker next to a partially burned
flag, Willett says that from what he remembers about Graham's lengthy rap
sheet and nasty demeanor, the inmate was a bad choice for the protesters.
"He was the sorriest person I came across in all my years in the prison
system," he says. "Mean, uncooperativethe last guy you'd want as a poster
child for the anti-capital punishment lobby."

Willett may be certain that Graham was justly convicted, but is he so sure
that all the men whose deaths he witnessed were guilty? Does he think any
of the 89 may have been innocent? "I would hope not, with all of the
appeals, the process that takes years and the judges and everybody looking
at it," he says. "But I'm also clear that you're going to have mistakes if
humans are messing with itit's just a fact."

Indeed, a shameful array of legal blunders has been uncovered through DNA
testing, especially in Texas, which leads the country in the number of
people freed after biological evidence proved their innocence. Dallas
County, meanwhile, has a greater number of DNA exonerations than any other
jurisdiction in the nation. Some of the 13 Dallas inmates released since
2001 had been locked up for decades. I mention this, and Willett nods. "I
think if we have DNA then we have to use it to prove the person did
itisn't that just logical?" he says. "I don't know why anyone involved on
either side wouldn't want to do that."

Guilt or innocence aside, he says, watching each person die was wrenching.
"The hardest were the young fellowsone was 29," he says. "They're like
youperfectly healthy, some have good personalities. You think, there's a
young man who ruined someone's life and ruined his own, and he probably
could have really been something. These are people who might have gone a
different direction. If they'd been with a different crowd, maybe they
wouldn't be lying here tonight."

When Willett was hired as a Huntsville prison guard in 1971, he took a
tour of the units. He felt nervous and jumpy as he followed a captain
through crowds of convicts in white uniforms. The inmates looked him up
and down, sizing him up. He tried not to meet their gaze. Growing up in
the nearby town of Groesbeck, he'd heard prisons were sad, rough places,
full of long days of loneliness and backbreaking work. The only person he
knew who'd gone to the pen was the father of a kid he'd known growing up.
The man had been caught stealing cattle. Back then, Willett never expected
to spend time in a prison. He'd been working at a gas station while
attending Sam Houston State University, and he heard that guard jobs paid
better. That's how he wound up sitting in a guard tower on a muggy summer
night, looking out over the prison yard. His perch on the No. 1 picket was
on the northeast corner of the Walls, the unit named for the red brick
walls that reach 30 feet high. The picket was right over the death house
and the warden's residence next door. Willett couldn't imagine that nearly
three decades later, he would live there with his family.

When I ask Willett what his reaction would have been had someone told him
he would spend the next 30 years of his life in prisons, he thinks for a
moment. "I'd have been really sad," he says. "It wasn't what I wanted to
do. The first 6 months it was as boring as life could be, alone out there
on the picket at night. Then I got switched to the day shift, and it went
by faster." Though he had been raised in a farming familyhis mother's
parents were illiterate Polish immigrants who grew tomatoes and sold them
in nearby townshis dreams of working the land had given way to an interest
in business and ideas of sitting in an office somewhere. But by the time
he graduated with a business degree from Sam Houston, he was comfortable
working in the prison and continued to be rewarded with promotions.

One day in the late '70s, not long after he made lieutenant, Willett was
introduced to Janice Joiner, a pretty blond criminal justice major. They
married a year later at the clubhouse of the women's penitentiary on the
outskirts of Huntsville. Their elaborate wedding cake and flower
arrangements were made by female inmates in vocational classes. The couple
moved into a two-story state residence that backed up to the Walls. On
their wedding night, throngs of people streamed onto the grounds for the
prison rodeo, a Texas tradition that drew thousands of spectators each
year. Janice had worked in the prison and wasn't terribly frightened to
live near it, but the transition wasn't seamless. "I wake up and Jim's
working and I'm a bride and there's hundreds of people in our yard,
inmates handing out programs," she says. "I walked back to my apartment
that was empty and just cried." She soon grew accustomed to prison life.
"I always felt very safe," she says. "Right outside our bedroom window was
a picket."

As the years went on, they had 2 children, Janice worked as a probation
officer and Jim kept getting promoted. He had the rare combination of
compassion, take-charge leadership skill and social ease that inspires
trust and earns the respect and allegiance of other men. By the 1990s, he
was an assistant warden. And then one day in 1998 he got a phone call.

He was on his way to watch his son play baseball when the regional
director of the Texas prison system called and said he wanted Willett to
replace the outgoing warden of the Walls Unit. Willett immediately thought
of what the position would mean. He didn't like the idea of accepting
higher pay for a post that included executions. He said he'd have to talk
to his wife about it. When he did, Janice suggested he pray about his
dilemma. He followed her advice. "When I woke up I felt more at ease," he
says. "I went and talked to [the regional director], told him I wasn't
comfortable with the executions." Willett suggested they go through the
rest of the people on their list, and if afterward they still thought he
was the best candidate, he might reconsider.

They called back a few days later and offered him the job again. This
time, he accepted. If he was being called by God to do this, at least he'd
made it clear that he wasn't comfortable taking people's lives in exchange
for a raise. And he would see to it that when an execution did take place,
it would go as smoothly as a killing can.

The morning of his first execution, Willett woke up and immediately
remembered what the day held in store. He dressed in a sportcoat as
always, said goodbye to his wife and walked over to the prison unit that
he'd just been chosen to manage. There, in the employee dining room, he
ate his usual breakfast of sausage, eggs and bacon. A meticulous man, he
repeatedly ran through the series of tasks that were now his: Ensure the
inmate is delivered to one of the death house's eight cells, see that he
gets his last meal by 4 p.m., find out what his last words will be so he
knows when to give the signal, and then, at 6 p.m., lead him down the
hallway to the death chamber.

Willett, a Methodist, had prayed a lot about thisasking God to make it
smooth and trouble-freeand as the day went on, he prayed some more. He
reviewed the inmate's file. His name was Joseph Cannon, death row Inmate
634. He was 19 when his first mug shot was taken, and it shows a handsome
young man, blond with a square jaw and a cleft chin. He'd been convicted
of a petty crime in San Antonio a couple of years before, and his
court-appointed attorney took an interest in the scrappy teenager. The
lawyer's sister let Cannon stay with her while he served his probation.
One day in 1977, Cannon shot her seven times with her own .22, then took
some cash and traveler's checks from her purse and made off in her
daughter's car. He was arrested a few hours later and confessed to the
murder.

The man Willett greeted in the death house cell hardly resembled the
tough-looking youth in the photograph. He was 38 now, heavier and
tired-looking, with the resigned look of a man who had spent decades in
small cells and prison yards.

"You'll be getting your supper after a while," Willett told him. "And the
chaplain will be here with you until..." His words trailed off. He glanced
toward the door. Hell, he thought, I'm not very good at this. He'd been
worrying about this for days, planning ways to put the man at ease.
Looking toward the door wasn't the way to do it.

"Will you want to make a final statement?" he asked.

Cannon was quiet for a moment and then nodded. "I guess I will," he said.

A few minutes before six, Willett met in the office with Wayne Scott, a
friend who had served as a guard with him and was now director of the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice, as well as a few regional and deputy
directors. Governor Bush's office called and said to go ahead, followed by
the state attorney general's office. Scott looked at Willett. So did the
other men. He left the room and walked down the hall to the second-to-last
cell, where the chaplain was waiting with Cannon. "Inmate Cannon," he
said, "it's time for you to go into the next room with me." The inmate
followed without a word. When they got to the death chamber, Cannon paused
in the doorway, taking in the gurney covered in white sheets in the
9-by-12-foot room. Willett didn't even have to tell him to get on it. As
Cannon lay down, Willett stood at his head, the chaplain at his feet.

A group of officers called the tie-down team took their places around the
gurney. In quick, practiced motions they strapped Cannon down, each person
securing an arm, a leg, a wrist, an ankle. Others fastened belts over his
torso. In about half a minute, their job was done and they were gone. Two
people from the medical team came in to attach the IVs. The 3rd medical
technician remained in the next room and would serve as the executioner.

Twenty minutes later, the medical technician still hadn't found a vein.
Usually they did two IVs, one as a backup. Willett's predecessor had told
him that even on bad nights, this would take no more than five minutes, 10
at the most. What the hell was going on? Cannon watched quietly as the
woman jabbed at his arm. Willett, sweating, wondered what the inmate was
thinking. He hoped that Cannon's last meal of ribs, fried chicken,
chocolate ice cream and chocolate cake wouldn't make him sick. Finally,
the technician looked up. "Warden, I think we've got a good one in this
arm," she said. "Can we go with just the one?"

Willett nodded.

The woman left, leaving just Willett, the chaplain and Cannon in the room.
Cannon looked at the IV in his arm, then turned his head to watch through
the plate glass window as the witnesses walked into the viewing gallery.

Willett observed a woman enter the viewing area and come to a halt when
she saw Cannon lying on the gurney. Willett guessed she was his mother.
Cannon looked at her, expressionless. Somebody behind her touched her
shoulder, and she moved closer to the glass.

On the other side of a thin wall in the viewing area, five members of the
victim's family gathered.

All of the witnesses stood; a dozen sets of eyes peered through the glass
into the death chamber.

For his last statement, Cannon rambled in a nervous voice about his
victim, his family and his crime, most of it jumbled together in an
awkward rush of words. Then he shook his head and closed his eyes. The
chaplain rested his hand on Cannon's ankle. As if in slow motion, Willett
lifted his reading glasses from his nose, the signal for the hidden
executioner to start the first of the three fluids flowing. As he gave the
sign, he prayed. Lord, have mercy on this man's soul. It was silent. So
quiet Willett could hear the liquids moving through the IV line.

And then he heard a voice: "Warden." He looked at the chaplain, trying to
figure out who spoke, then down at Cannon.

"Warden," the inmate said again. "It fell out."

Willett looked at the man's arm. Sure enough, the needle was spilling its
contents onto the sheets.

Willett ran over to the window and tugged at the curtain, trying to shield
the witnesses. The fabric came unhooked from the rod. Standing on the
other side using the drawstring, the chaplain managed to cover the glass.
Someone was crying, probably Cannon's mother.

What a nightmare. Willett had never heard of this happening before. In
fact, 10 years before there had been a somewhat spectacular IV "blowout,"
complete with liquids spraying around the room and onto the viewing glass.
But no one had told him about that one. The medical staff came in again
and hooked up the IV for the second time. The curtains were opened, and
Willett asked Cannon if he wanted to make another statement. This time,
the inmate was more assured, clearer. He looked at the victim's daughter
and said he was sorry.

Again, Willett lifted his glasses. And again, the silence and flowing
liquids.

Outside the prison, people milled around Main Street, men got off work,
mothers picked up children from ballet and soccer, and Willett's own wife
made dinner.

Here inside these tall prison walls, in this little room, sodium pentathol
was easing into Cannon's veins and shutting down his central nervous
system. Firing neurons and twitching muscles slowed as the drug put him to
sleep. Then came the pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant. His diaphragm
ceased its up-and-down motion, and the muscles covering his rib cage
froze, paralyzed. As Cannon let out his last breath, there was a snoring
sound, like the air escaping from a balloon.

Then, to finish the job, the potassium chloride trickled through the line.
It's the drug that stops the heart.

Willett waited 3 minutes, just like he'd been told to, and called in the
doctor. Joseph John Cannon was pronounced dead at 7:28 p.m. and wheeled
out of the room.

Minutes later Willett sat down to dinner with his wife. He was quiet,
sitting at the dining room table pushing food around on his plate with a
fork. "I didn't want to prod," Janice recalls. "So we just talked about
other things."

Later, he told her about the IV blowout. "You're not going to believe what
happened," he said. "If anything could go wrong, of course it would be my
first night." Before he went to bed, he recorded the day's events in his
journal, a ritual that he would continue after every execution to come.

"I know that I'll never want to do this, but I can hope that my next
execution, and all the ones that follow, will go better," he wrote in his
journal, parts of which were later published in a book called Warden:
Prison Life and Death From the Inside Out. "Soon we'll move into the
warden's residence, which is located just outside the Walls, not far from
the number one picket, which hovers over the death house. The place where
I will eat with my family, where I will joke with my kids and watch
mindless TV shows with my wife, lies about 50 feet from where I take off
my glasses and shut down a human life."

To most people, raising a family on the prison grounds would seem grim and
dangerous. But for the Willetts it was normaland an opportunity to set an
example of family for people who had lost their way and wound up behind
bars. Their children, Jacob and Jordan, were young adults by the time
Willett took the warden post that required him to manage the executions.
By then, they'd spent the better part of their lives living next door to
the prison.

"We got to see different cultures of people, different sides of people
that other kids don't get to experience," says Jacob, 26. "I can get along
with just about anybody."

When he and his older sister Jordan were growing up, the prison system
allowed well-behaved inmates to work on the grounds near their house,
doing landscaping and odd jobs. When Jacob was 5, he would sometimes play
with an inmate named Donald. "Once he snuck some Ding Dongs out of the
prison and brought them out to the house, and we shared one," Jacob
recalls. When he was older, he'd play catch with a middle-aged prisoner
named Hines. The man had been in and out of prison for some 40 years, and
when he got out, he sent Jacob a letter listing "the top 10 things you can
do to enhance the quality of your life through God." Jacob still keeps it
tucked in his Bible. "I treated him like just another person," he says.
"They're human beings too, and a lot of people don't look at it like
that."

When his sister was little, she grew close to an inmate named Stafford who
worked in the yard. Janice recalls that he had gorgeous handwriting and
could make anything out of scrap. "One year he made little wooden pumpkins
for every child in Jordan's classhe painted them and put their names on
every one," she says. "They were beautiful. They'd make something for
every holiday." After he got out of prison, Stafford came by the house and
gave Jordan a present. He died a month later. "He'd gotten home from work,
lay down on the couch and had a stroke. He wasn't even 50," Janice says.
"That was a tough onehe'd been around for a long time."

Janice kept an eye on the kids when they were with the inmates, and she
always had a rule for the men: If my children ask you why you're here,
tell them the truth. "Don't blame someone else," she says she told them.
"That was very important to me. I didn't want them to feel sorry and think
these guys didn't do something wrong. They just learned that these people
are people, and they do have lives. They knew these guys had done
something wrong to get there and that when they got their life turned
around they had an opportunity to go back out and live with the rest of
us."

For Jacob, knowing that the men his father had a hand in putting to death
had committed horrible crimes enabled him to accept capital punishment as
part of his father's job and a logical consequence of unspeakable actions.
"A lot of those guys don't get put in that position for something they did
right," he tells me. "They don't get put in that position unless they've
done something that's completely inhumane. I don't think that as human
beings we have the right to judge, but if they do those things they've got
to have some kind of consequence."

When Jacob's high-school class visited the prison for a tour and his
father escorted them through the death chamber, he watched impassively
while other students reeled. "I wasn't really shocked," he says. "It was
just his job. My dad's not the kind of person that would kill somebody.
He's a solid guyhe was in a position to do a job he was called to do, and
he did it as best he could."

Janice, who seems to have more ethical concerns about the death penalty
than her son, echoes Jacob's thoughts about her husband's job as warden
and her belief that God had a hand in leading him to it. "It was
interesting to me that those three years were the [death chamber's]
busiest," she says. There were times during those years that three inmates
were put to death in one week, sometimes two in the same day. "If there
was going to be a time in our history when you would need someone who's a
humble person who treats everyone with respect whether they're inside the
bars or not, he does." This, she says, is why even though he was
reluctant, Willett continued to give the prison system his time. "I always
envision Jim as this horse, trying to slow down from going over a cliff,"
she says. "He never really wanted to move up in the system; he was always
saying, 'Whoa.' [Criminal justice] was a profession for me; it was a job
for him. But he was good at it."

Willett stresses that his first priority was always his family. "Working
at the prison was something I did eight hours a day so I could do what I
wanted the other 16," he says. "I liked my job, but it wasn't my favorite
thing in life." Jacob was an avid baseball player, and Willett asked his
supervisors not to schedule an execution on game days. "He made it very
clear to everyone that when there was a game, he was going to be there,"
Janice says. "He got an award our son's senior year in high school for
being the only parent who never missed a game."

The day Gary Graham was executed and troops of media and protesters camped
out in front of the prison, Jacob was working at a nearby bar. Sports was
on one TV and the news was on another, showing Jesse Jackson standing on
the steps of the Walls amid hundreds of protesters. At one point, Jacob
caught a glimpse of his father standing outside the prison. Jacob's boss
came in and said there were several calls for him. One was a scout with
good news: He'd been drafted by the Yankees (he decided to go to college
instead). The other calls were from local reporters.

Then, Jim Willett, having stepped away from the melee for a moment to use
the phone, called to congratulate him. "He told me he loved me, that he
was proud of me," Jacob says.

While he has had brief conversations with his father about the executions,
it's not something he likes to bring up. "If he has bad recollections
about it, I don't want to be the one to talk about it," he says. "I'd much
rather talk about baseball or something."

If Willett struggled to cope with the impact of presiding over the deaths
of 89 people and being there for their last moments, he didn't talk about
it much to anyone. "Jim's pretty unflappablewhatever turmoil he's feeling
inside, he's not going to show that," says Wayne Scott, Willett's old
friend. "Jim was much more concerned about his staff than he was about
himselfthat's just the sort of person he is." Willett was careful to
rotate officers involved in the executions as much as he could, giving
them breaks. And he always made sure they knew there were counselors
available if they needed to talk.

In 2000, when Texas set a record for the number of inmates put to death in
one year40Willett and his employees participated in a National Public
Radio documentary called Witness to an Execution. He ended up narrating it
himself, and the haunting and evocative piece won a Peabody Award.

As a lover of history and a longtime expert when it comes to the Texas
prison system, Willett opens the broadcast with a description of the death
house, the site of all state executions since 1924. "We've carried out a
lot of executions here lately, and with all the debate about the death
penalty, I thought this might be a good time to let you hear exactly how
we do these things," he says. "Sometimes I wonder whether people really
understand what goes on down here and the effect it has on us."

Of the comments from nearly a dozen prison guards, chaplains and reporters
who witnessed large numbers of executions, some of the most telling come
from Jim Brazzil, the chaplain who worked under Willett and had by the
time of the broadcast been with 114 inmates while they were put to death.
"I usually put my hand right below their knee, you know, and I usually
give 'em a squeeze, let 'em know I'm right there," Brazzil says. "You can
feel the trembling, the fear that's there, the anxiety that's there. You
can feel the heart surging, you know. You can see it pounding through
their shirt." Later in the piece, he talks about his last interactions
with inmates before they passed out. "One of 'em would say, 'I just want
to tell you thank you.' One of 'em would say, 'Don't forget to mail my
letters.' Another one would say, 'Just tell me againis it gonna hurt?' One
of them would say, 'What do I do when I see God?' You've got 45 seconds
and you're trying to tell the guy what to say to God?"

One of the voices in the NPR story belongs to Fred Allen, a former officer
on the tie-down team who participated in about 120 executions. He resigned
after a mental breakdown. "I was just working in the shop and all of a
sudden something just triggered in me and I started shaking," he says. His
wife asked him what was wrong, and he started to weep uncontrollably. "All
of these executions all of a sudden all sprung forward. Just like taking
slides in a film projector and having a button and just pushing a button
and just watching, over and over: him, him, him...You see I can barely
even talk because I'm thinking more and more of it. You know, there was
just so many of 'em."

The broadcast closes with Willett as he looks forward to retiring. "To
tell you the truth, this is something I won't miss a bit," he says. "There
are times when I'm standing there, watching those fluids start to flow,
and wonder whether what we're doing here is right. It's something I'll be
thinking about for the rest of my life."

As Willett leads me through the museum and recounts his time in the death
chamber, he mentions that usually when an inmate was lying on the gurney
he would ask the man if the straps were too tight. "It's about making the
inmate comfortable," he says. I ask if he thinks it's ironic that he would
try to make a man comfortable right before signaling the executioner to
kill him. He looks at me for a moment and nods. "It's ironic as heck!" he
says.

We talk about reports of botched lethal injections across the country.
Does he think lethal injection is inhumane? "I don't think Texas has any
problem with that," he says. "A medical person once told me we give 'em
enough to put a horse to sleep." Willett avoids making political
statements or taking a position for or against the death penalty. But he's
unabashed in expressing his compassion for all of the people brought
together in the execution processthose who perform the execution itself,
the inmates and their victims, and the families who sit in the viewing
gallery on either side of the wall.

"One night after an execution, the inmate had died and I called the doctor
in," he tells me, standing in between Old Sparky and the case with the IV
bag and syringes. "I move over and I'm facing these two [viewing] rooms.
On one side of the wall was a daughter of the inmate, on the other side
was the daughter of the victim, both deep in thought. And I thought, they
don't even know the other is there. And what made it eerie was that they
were both victims."

Over the next 2 weeks, publications around the world will report that
Texas, the epicenter of capital punishment, has put the brakes on its
well-oiled death machine. On the day in late September when the U.S.
Supreme Court announced it would consider the legality of lethal
injection, several Texas inmates were scheduled for execution. A team of
attorneys prepared an appeal for one of them based on the pending
decision, but their computer reportedly crashed and while they were
scrambling to fix it one of them called the Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals to say they would be a few minutes late and to please stay open.
They were told no, and a few hours later, their client was dead. The other
inmates, however, were granted stays, raising questions about a de facto
moratorium even in the state of Texas.

If that happens, Willett wouldn't necessarily oppose it. "I do wonder
sometimes, the people who are guilty of real violent murders or crimes
against children, why do they deserve to live?" he says. "But maybe we
don't have the right to ask thatI don't know. For me, it's up to the
people of Texas, whatever they want to do. If they said, 'Let's not have
executions,' I'd be fine with that."

(source: Dallas Observer)