New York Times

By SARA RIMER

HUNTSVILLE, Tex., Dec. 10 — Jim Willett, the war­den of the prison here, awak­ened a lit­tle before 5 a.m. on Tuesday in his home, which his wife, Janice, had dec­o­rat­ed for Christmas. He had not been look­ing for­ward to the day.

“My first thought was, ​‘Today’s an exe­cu­tion,’ ” he recalled lat­er that morn­ing. “ ​‘I won­der what he’ll be like.’ ”

Mr. Willett said he was hop­ing that the man who was to be put to death short­ly after 6 p.m. would not resist and that the exe­cu­tion would pro­ceed smooth­ly. His job requires him to stand at the head of the per­son strapped on the gur­ney and to sig­nal the anony­mous exe­cu­tion­er in the next room to inject the seda­tive and two lethal chem­i­cals through a syringe. In his two and a half years as war­den, Mr. Willett has giv­en the sig­nal — rais­ing his glass­es — that has killed 84 people.

“Just from a Christian stand­point, you can’t see one of these and not con­sid­er that maybe it’s not right,” said Mr. Willett, 51, talk­ing in his office, with the blownup pho­tographs of his chil­dren, Jacob, 19, and Jordan, 14, on the wall.

It is the worst part of his job, he said, but it is his job just the same.

Now, the prison here, known as the Huntsville unit, was about to exe­cute three men in three days. While that is not an unusu­al week for Huntsville, the nation’s busiest death cham­ber, it would bring the year’s total to 40, the most peo­ple legal­ly killed by any state in one year in American his­to­ry, accord­ing to the Death Penalty Information Center, a non­prof­it research group in Washington.

Those who cham­pi­on the death penal­ty, the law enforce­ment offi­cials who call for it, the juries who vote for it, the judges who uphold it, the par­don boards and the gov­er­nors who sign off on it, are not the ones who walk into the death cham­ber and help end lives. That task falls to Mr. Willett and a dozen or so mem­bers of his staff: hus­bands and fathers who coach base­ball, go fish­ing, attend church and lead most­ly ordi­nary lives except when it comes time to lead the con­demned to a 9‑by-12-foot room with turquoise walls, deep inside the prison, and secure them to a gur­ney with eight mus­tard-col­ored leather straps so that they can be inject­ed with the drugs that will kill them.

The first lethal injec­tion in the coun­try was per­formed in that room in 1982, and with the three exe­cu­tions last week the total num­ber rose to 239, more than half of them in the last four years.

These men do their jobs in a town and a state that ardent­ly sup­port the death penal­ty. But in the week of the three exe­cu­tions they shared their usu­al­ly unspo­ken doubts, includ­ing their uneasi­ness with the detach­ment that allows them to go about their work.

Kenneth Dean, 37, is the head of the tie-down team, which does exact­ly what the name implies. A shy, burly man whom the oth­er offi­cers tease by call­ing him the Teddy Bear, Mr. Dean has per­formed that job about 130 times. He does not like to keep count.

On Tuesday morn­ing, he had made plans with his chil­dren, Kourtney, 7, and Kevin, 13, for the evening. Recently divorced, he gets to spend a cou­ple hours with them on Tuesday nights.

“I told them, ​‘Daddy has to work late tonight, he has an exe­cu­tion.’ ” Lately, Mr. Dean said, his daugh­ter has been ask­ing a lot of ques­tions: “ ​‘What is an exe­cu­tion? What do you do?’ ”

“It’s hard explain­ing to a 7‑year-old,” he added. ​“She asked me, ​‘Why do you do it?’ I told her, ​‘Sweetie, it’s part of my job.’ ”

Focusing on Routine

Mr. Dean, a prison offi­cer with the rank of major, and the oth­er peo­ple who car­ry out the exe­cu­tions say they cope with their jobs by focus­ing on the rou­tine. ​“We make sure every­thing is done cor­rect­ly,” Mr. Dean said.

The worst night­mare of the tie-down team had occurred in June when Gary Graham, 39, con­vict­ed of a 1981 rob­bery-mur­der that he main­tained he did not com­mit, refused to leave his cell. Mr. Dean and oth­er mem­bers of his team had had to put on face shields and armor and forcibly remove him. It was only the third ​“cell extrac­tion,” as they are called, since l982. Mr. Dean went in first.

From all reports, Garry Miller, 33, a for­mer bar­tender who was to be put to death on Tuesday for the 1989 rape and mur­der of 7‑year-old April Marie Wilson, was not going to give them any trou­ble. He had told his lawyers not to file any fur­ther appeals. He said he was ready to die.

Mr. Miller’s exe­cu­tion had not gen­er­at­ed unusu­al atten­tion, and only a hand­ful of death-penal­ty oppo­nents were expect­ed to show up out­side the prison. There are five seats for jour­nal­ists at every exe­cu­tion, and this reporter was there for Mr. Miller’s.

At 6:07 p.m., Mr. Dean escort­ed mem­bers of the vic­tim’s fam­i­ly, sev­er­al prison offi­cials and reporters down a long cor­ri­dor, through a small gar­den with marigolds bloom­ing beside white trel­lis­es, and past a steel door into what is known as the death house: eight cells and the death chamber.

The wit­ness­es stared through a large, barred win­dow into the death cham­ber. Mr. Miller, a big man with glass­es and an inmate’s pasty skin, was lying on the gur­ney, with a Bible on his chest, under a white sheet. He had an IV in each wrist. The IV’s are always insert­ed before the wit­ness­es are brought in. Mr. Miller’s head rest­ed on a pil­low, an accom­mo­da­tion added to the rou­tine by the war­den last year. There used to be only a tow­el at the head of the gurney.

The war­den stood just behind Mr. Miller’s head. The prison chap­lain, Jim Brazzil, was at his feet.

Mr. Miller looked straight at Marjorie Howlett, the moth­er of the lit­tle girl he had killed, who was cry­ing. They had known each oth­er before the murder.

“Maggie, I am sor­ry.” Mr. Miller said through a micro­phone above his head. ​“I always want­ed to tell you, but I just did­n’t know how.”

He said a brief prayer and told the war­den he was ready. The war­den raised his glass­es. At 6:23 p.m., a doc­tor came into the room and pro­nounced Mr. Miller dead.

After the wit­ness­es filed out, the tie-down team re-entered the death cham­ber, unfas­tened the straps around Mr. Miller’s body, and trans­ferred him to anoth­er gur­ney. The body was loaded into a wait­ing hearse and tak­en to the Huntsville Funeral Home. The death cer­tifi­cate would read: ​“State-ordered legal homicide.”

About 15 min­utes lat­er, as part of the exe­cu­tion-night rit­u­al, Mrs. Howlett was seat­ed in the office across from the prison, answer­ing ques­tions from reporters. ​“I’m very glad I came,” Mrs. Howlett told jour­nal­ists. ​“I had to see him gone.”

By 7 p.m., an exhaust­ed Mr. Dean, still in his gray uni­form, was across town, sit­ting with his chil­dren in his car in the dri­ve­way of his for­mer wife. His daugh­ter was on his lap. ​“She said, ​‘Do you have anoth­er one tomor­row?’ ” Mr. Dean recalled lat­er. ​“I said, ​‘Yes, I have one for the next two days.’ ”

“She said, ​‘Why do you have so many this week?’ I said, ​‘I don’t know, Sweetie.’ ”

Mr. Dean, who is a Baptist, says he prays before and after every exe­cu­tion. He did not tell his daugh­ter about his own ques­tions. ​“All of us won­der if it’s right,” he said ear­li­er in the day. ​“You know, there’s a high­er judg­ment than us. You sec­ond-guess your­self. I know how I feel, but is it the right way to feel? Is what we do right? But if we did­n’t do it, who would do it?”

A few miles away, the war­den was at home, in front of his com­put­er. He was record­ing the exe­cu­tion, as he has every one since he start­ed, writ­ing of Mr. Miller:

He was soon strapped in. At one point he told the med­ical team that he held noth­ing against them for what they were doing. He’d had a pret­ty good after­noon with Chaplain Brazzil.

Soon, the room was emp­ty of every­one but Miller, Brazzil and I. We talked quick­ly about what was about to hap­pen. Then I asked if there was anything else.

He said, ​‘I guess resus­ci­ta­tion would be out of the question?’

Miller began by apol­o­giz­ing to the moth­er of the 7‑year-old girl he had raped and mur­dered. I won­dered what that moth­er thought. Miller took a very deep breath and held it. It seemed to be about 15 sec­onds before he let out his last breath. 

The max­i­mum-secu­ri­ty Huntsville unit, built in 1848, takes up two blocks in the mid­dle of this East Texas town of 35,000 peo­ple. Its red-brick walls are 30 feet high; hence its nick­name, The Walls. A Christmas sign, a herd of rein­deer and a string of Christmas lights dec­o­rate the front wall.

The busi­ness of Huntsville is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, known as the T.D.C.J., which has its head­quar­ters here. There are sev­en pris­ons in the area, hous­ing about 13,400 inmates. The prison con­tain­ing death row, where there are 443 con­demned peo­ple, is in Livingston, 40 miles away. They are brought here on the after­noon of their exe­cu­tion and spend their final hours in a death-house cell.

It is bet­ter, Mr. Dean said, that the death-row inmates are in Livingston. That way, he said, he and his fel­low offi­cers are not help­ing exe­cute peo­ple they know.

On Wednesday morn­ing, Mr. Dean was talk­ing about how he some­times wor­ried about his own detach­ment. ​“That was one part I had to deal with,” he said. ​“You expect to feel a cer­tain way, then you think, ​‘Is there some­thing wrong with me that I don’t?’ Then after a while you get to think, ​‘Why isn’t this both­er­ing me?’ It is such a clin­i­cal process. You expect the worst with death, but you don’t see the worst in death.”

The detach­ment Mr. Dean describes is not only com­mon among those who par­tic­i­pate in exe­cu­tions, but nec­es­sary for them to be able to do their jobs, said Robert Jay Lifton, a psy­chi­a­trist who wrote about such peo­ple with his co-author, Greg Mitchell, in a new book, ​“Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience and the End of Executions” (William Morrow).

“It vio­lates a pro­found human reluc­tance to kill, and they must over­come it,” Dr. Lifton said. The clin­i­cal nature of lethal injec­tions makes it eas­i­er to kill. ​“You have the ulti­mate form of med­ical­iza­tion, which enables those car­ry­ing out the exe­cu­tion in many cas­es to feel very lit­tle,” Dr. Lifton said. ​“It also mutes it for the soci­ety at large.”

Shortly before 1 p.m. Mr. Dean and Terry Green, anoth­er mem­ber of the tie-down team, were await­ing the arrival of Daniel Hittle, a 50-year-old for­mer welder, who was to be exe­cut­ed that evening for the 1989 mur­der of a Garland, Tex., police offi­cer, Gerald Walker.

The prison world is one in which it is dif­fi­cult to refuse a request from a supe­ri­or, but turn­ing down an invi­ta­tion to serve on the death team is one refusal that is accept­able, Mr. Dean and Mr. Green said. Those who par­tic­i­pate in exe­cu­tions must be at the rank of sergeant or above, which is a pool of about 25 peo­ple. Several have declined. ​“No one looks down on them,” said Mr. Green, who is a captain.

There is no extra pay for exe­cu­tions. (Mr. Dean, the third high­est-rank­ing offi­cer at the prison, earns $36,000 a year, with prison hous­ing as a ben­e­fit. Mr. Green earns $30,000. Others on the tie-down team earn less.) Mr. Green’s job is to secure the inmate’s left wrist to the gur­ney and both shoulders.

Thoughts on Executions

Mr. Dean said he had thought long and hard about his stand on the death penal­ty before he said ​“yes” 10 years ago to a super­vi­sor’s request that he join the team. ​“I researched it,” he said. ​“I spoke to pas­tors to make sure I was­n’t mis­in­ter­pret­ing what the Bible said about the death penalty.”

Mr. Green nod­ded. ​“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” said Mr. Green, 48, who has been a mem­ber of the tie-down team for two years, para­phras­ing Matthew 22:22. To Mr. Green, who is a Baptist, that pas­sage means that the law should be upheld, and in Texas the law requires that some peo­ple be exe­cut­ed for their crimes. Mr. Green says he sees the tie-down team as uphold­ing the law.

Mr. Dean said he keeps a close eye on his team dur­ing exe­cu­tions. ​“I’ll watch every­one’s face to see if they’re O.K., ” he said. ​“A lot of them might have an emotional moment.”

In February, he noticed that two super­vi­sors had tears in their eyes after the exe­cu­tion of Betty Lou Beets, 62, who had been con­vict­ed of the 1985 killing of her fifth hus­band. ​“After they got out­side, we talked about it,” Mr. Dean said. ​“They relat­ed it to their mothers.”

By about 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Larry Fitzgerald, a prison spokesman whose job requires him to wit­ness every exe­cu­tion, had pre­pared the press pack­ets on Mr. Hittle’s exe­cu­tion, includ­ing an hour-by- hour report on his final three days.

Mr. Hittle’s exe­cu­tion went smooth­ly. When it was over, the wid­ow of the mur­dered offi­cer, Beckie Walker, left with­out talk­ing to reporters. Jimmie George, an offi­cer with the Garland Police Department, released a statement.

“The death of Daniel Hittle does not bring Gerald back,” it said, but would ​“guar­an­tee that no police offi­cer will ever face the dan­ger of deal­ing with him again.”

Later that night, Warden Willett sat at his com­put­er and wrote:

Shortly after six I went to cell No. 2 and told Hittle that it was time for him to come out. He said ​‘O.K.’ and fol­lowed me into the death cham­ber. He jumped onto the gur­ney.

I took off my glass­es as I backed out of the way of the wit­ness­es. It took a lit­tle bit longer than nor­mal for the first drug to take effect. By 6:20, though, the doc­tor had pro­nounced Hittle a dead man.

At a few min­utes before 8 a.m. on Thursday, the war­den received a phone call from a man he did not know. ​“He told me how wrong what we are doing was,” Mr. Willett said. ​“He went on for about nine minutes.”

“You know what I final­ly told him: ​‘If you go over to Austin and tell them to get rid of the death penal­ty, it would­n’t hurt my feel­ings at all.“ ‘

The war­den was in a reflec­tive mood. ​“I don’t real­ly know how I feel about this,” he said. ​“The sad thing is we end up with more vic­tims, like the inmate’s moth­er. Can you imag­ine watch­ing your son die?”

“On the oth­er hand,” he added, ​“I can under­stand why she’s there.”

Family mem­bers of the con­demned can wit­ness exe­cu­tions, and many times the war­den has looked on as the moth­er of the man on the gur­ney watched her son take his last breath. None of the moth­ers or fathers of the three con­demned men were here.

It looked as though the third exe­cu­tion was going to hold to the rou­tine. Shortly before noon, Mr. Willett’s sec­re­tary, Kim Huff, had an update on Claude Jones, who was to be exe­cut­ed that night for the 1989 armed rob­bery and mur­der of a liquor store own­er, Allen Hilzendager, 44, in the town of Point Blank.

“He says he does­n’t want a damn stay, he’s 60 years old, he’s ready to go,” Ms. Huff said.

The war­den left to meet his wife for a rare lunch out, at the Catfish Place. When Mr. Willett got up from the table to greet friends, Mrs. Willett talked about the toll the job takes on her husband.

“I was so wor­ried about him a few weeks ago,” she said, refer­ring to her hus­band’s reac­tion to a man he had helped kill recent­ly. ​“He said, ​‘I met one of the nicest men I’ve ever met today.’ I thought, ​‘Oh, he’s fix­ing to break.’ ”

The usu­al­ly easy­go­ing and genial war­den did not break. But after near­ly 30 years with T.D.C.J., Mr. Willett is look­ing for­ward to his retire­ment ear­ly next year, when he said he could stop ​“mess­ing with these executions.”

“If jurors had to draw straws to see who was going to pull the switch or start the lethal injec­tion,” he said, ​“there would­n’t be as many executions.”

The war­den had recent­ly dis­cussed with his staff mem­bers their roles in exe­cu­tions: ​“I said that my part in this, and all these oth­er folks’ part in this thing, is just a frac­tion in this whole process. Someone who’s sat on the jury has had some part in what I do. It helps you to not bear the whole bur­den of putting this guy to death.”

Thursday, the odds caught up with the war­den and the oth­ers. The third exe­cu­tion did not go smooth­ly. It was delayed by about 30 min­utes while the med­ical team strug­gled to insert an IV into a vein of Mr. Jones. He had been a long­time intra­venous drug user.

Leaving the prison at about 7 p.m., Mr. Dean looked drained. ​“They had to stick him about five times,” he said. ​“They final­ly put it in his leg.”

The vic­tim’s sis­ter, Gayle Currie, wit­nessed the exe­cu­tion, and said after­ward of Mr. Jones, ​“It gave me a peace of mind to know that he will nev­er hurt anyone again.”

Mr. Fitzgerald, the prison spokesman, was vis­i­bly relieved. ​“This is the best day of the year for me,” he said. ​“I don’t have any more exe­cu­tions this year. I’ve had it. Forty is a lot.” He had now wit­nessed 144 exe­cu­tions in five years.

“It both­ers me,” said Mr. Fitzgerald, 63, a for­mer radio reporter who likes to cul­ti­vate the air of a man who has seen it all, ​“that I don’t remem­ber all their names.”

Mr. Dean, Mr. Green, Tim New, the assis­tant war­den, the war­den and the war­den’s wife con­vened at Murski’s, a local cafe. Their exhaus­tion was palpable.

‘We’re Not Barbarians’

Mr. Green said, ​“It’s crossed my mind that the Nazis were doing what they were told to do.” He paused. What he and his fel­low offi­cers were doing was dif­fer­ent, he said, ​“It’s not like that.”

It is painful, the men said, to walk out of the prison after an exe­cu­tion and have pro­test­ers call them murderers.

“We’re not bar­bar­ians,” Mr. New said. ​“We’re just reg­u­lar peo­ple, like you and every­body else. We have a job to do.”

But that job does set them apart. Mr. Dean said he felt most com­fort­able with his fel­low offi­cers. It is hard to talk to out­siders about what he does.

It was not until the next evening that the war­den sat down at his com­put­er and described the exe­cu­tion, includ­ing his fears that mem­bers of the med­ical team might have to cut Mr. Jones open to get to a vein:

The med­ical team could not find a vein. Now I was real­ly begin­ning to wor­ry. If you can’t stick a vein then a cut-down has to be per­formed. I have nev­er seen one and would just as soon go through the rest of my career the same way.

Just when I was real­ly get­ting wor­ried. one of the med­ical peo­ple hit a vein in the left leg. Inside calf to be exact.

The exe­cu­tion­er had warned me not to pan­ic as it was going to take a while to get the flu­ids in the body of the inmate tonight because he was going to push the drugs through very slowly.

Finally, the drug took effect and Jones took his last breath.