Eleven years after super­vis­ing his first exe­cu­tion as at the Florida State Prison at Starke, for­mer war­den Ron McAndrew is urg­ing an end to the death penal­ty. McAndrew is call­ing on states to aban­don cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and replace it with life with­out parole, a pun­ish­ment he notes is worse than the death penal­ty and pro­tects states from exe­cut­ing an inno­cent per­son. He observes, “(T)he most severe pun­ish­ment you could ever give any­one would be to lock them in a lit­tle cage made out of con­crete and steel … with a steel cot, a mat­tress that is 2 inch­es thick, a stain­less steel toi­let that does not have a lid, and you leave them there for the rest of their nat­ur­al life. There can’t be a more severe pun­ish­ment than that.”

McAndrew over­saw three exe­cu­tions dur­ing his tenure at Starke, includ­ing the infa­mous botched elec­tric chair exe­cu­tion of Pedro Medina in 1997. After that expe­ri­ence, he led Florida’s tran­si­tion from the elec­tric chair to lethal injec­tion before retir­ing from the Florida Department of Corrections. Though he has start­ed a new career as a cor­rec­tions con­sul­tant, McAndrew notes that he will nev­er be able to leave behind the expe­ri­ence of putting peo­ple to death. He says that the process lead­ing up to an exe­cu­tion and the act itself was a hor­ri­fy­ing expe­ri­ence and that he now real­izes the death penal­ty is ​“an absolute polit­i­cal manip­u­la­tion — a politi­cian’s best toy.” He said that after care­ful reflec­tion on his role in car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions he now real­izes, ​“I had no busi­ness stand­ing there.”

(Tallahassee Democrat, June 29, 2007) See New Voices and Life Without Parole.

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