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| Ex-jailers become US anti-death penalty advocates |
| By google.com - Chantal Valery (AFP) |
| Published: 12/20/2011 |
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WASHINGTON — "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. Read More. |
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An extremely small percentage of wardens and jailers are opposed to the death penalty. Those who are, as thos mentioned, use false or incomplete data to support their position.