Change of Heart from a Death Dealer

"He was guilty, he deserved what he got, but there was something not fitting here," said Ron McAndrew on May 28 as he spoke to a small group of people at the University of South Alabama about his experiences working on death row as the warden for Florida State Prison.

McAndrew, an internationally known corrections consultant and prison reform advocate, travels giving his lecture titled, "My Life as a Pro-Death Penalty Prison Warden ... and Why I Became an Abolotionist." He gave two lectures while visiting USA. His visit was sponsored by the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, the Quest for Social Justice, and Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty.

McAndrew shared his experiences of presiding over the application of numerous death penalty cases, and he spoke intimately about a few of the cases which still haunt him even years after his retirement. The first inmate he put to death was almost assuredly guilty and the victim's sister was adamant about attending the execution, according to McAndrew.

He met with the mother of the inmate and recalled, with some difficulty, the first thing she said to him. "Am I going to be able to hold my baby before you kill him?" It was execution by the electric chair, and it took 11 to 12 minutes for death to occur. Afterward, the victim's sister said she would never be satisfied "because it won't bring my sister back."

When McAndrew had to put a second inmate to death, he found holes in the initial investigation which could make grounds for appeal. He consulted an old friend and attorney for 25 years about the case who replied, "Do you think there's any justice on death row?" He described one execution when the sponge that was supposed to be soaked in a saline solution was squeezed too dry and the inmate was "[cooked] to death. The smell was putrid. It was in our nostrils, on our clothes," said McAndrew.

Another time, when he was studying lethal injections at a Huntsville prison, the inmate's neck had to be cut open to find a vein. "There was blood everywhere." McAndrew commented on the aesthetics of executions and how witnesses are never allowed to watch the preparation. It was so the execution "would look pretty for everyone." McAndrew ended his lecture discussing the dysfunctionality of the prison system and claimed that "20 percent of prisoners should be released tomorrow."

They were convicted of petty crimes. He believed, through his experience with prisoners, that many should be sent through education programs, taken out of prison and off death row, or sent to mental institutions. McAndrew's answer to the debate over the death penalty is life without possibility of parole. "That's a death penalty."

•The state of Alabama currently has a higher percentage of inmates to state population on death row than Texas.

•There is no statewide public defenders office, and most lawyers are paid about $1,000 for trial preparation.

•Post-conviction DNA testing, which has proven many death row inmates innocent, is denied in Alabama.