Randy Workman (pic­tured) is a for­mer war­den of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, where he over­saw 32 exe­cu­tions. In a recent inter­view, he was crit­i­cal of many aspects of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. He said the death penal­ty failed the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies and wast­ed mon­ey: ​“We spend mil­lions of dol­lars on these cas­es and going through the process and the end result is the fam­i­ly, do they feel vin­di­cat­ed? I’d say 90% of the time the peo­ple I’ve seen don’t.” He shared the advice he gave to a mur­der vic­tim’s moth­er (a rel­a­tive) who asked for his thoughts on whether to seek the death penal­ty: ​“I said here’s the deal, if you get the death penal­ty and you[’re] suc­cess­ful, you’re going to spend the next eight to 12 years back and forth in court and you’re going to relive your son’s death, because he has all these appeals.…I’ve seen some moth­ers that had some seri­ous bro­ken hearts that said this doesn’t end it for me.This isn’t jus­tice to me. This doesn’t do it.” He also said the threat of exe­cu­tion does not deter peo­ple from com­mit­ting mur­der: ​“I can tell you the peo­ple that I’ve exe­cut­ed, when they com­mit­ted crimes, they didn’t, wasn’t think­ing about the death penal­ty and a lot of them were high, or a lot of them in the gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple we’re deal­ing with today don’t have a lot of fore­thought about the end result.” Workman said he still sup­port­ed the death penal­ty, but would not want to ​“push the but­ton” on the chance the defen­dant might be inno­cent: ​“I would nev­er take that chance with my life,” he said.

(K. Fretland, ​“Oklahoma for­mer prison war­den: death penal­ty does not help fam­i­lies,” Guardian, April 28, 2014). See New Voices and Victims.

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