From CNN:
Ron McAndrew was once a firm supporter of capital punishment. His father, a Methodist minister, taught him the principle of “an eye for an eye,” and he carried that belief into a career in Florida corrections. By 1996 he was warden of Florida State Prison, where the state’s executions took place. Asked if carrying them out would trouble him, he said it would not.
That confidence faded. On execution mornings, McAndrew would sit with condemned men in their cells and ask if they wished to say anything, promising never to disclose what they told him. He does describe what he saw: crying, fear, nervous foot-tapping, and at times a startled look as the prisoners grasped how near death was. He then handed them to the execution team and took part in the procedure, fastening a restraint on the prisoner’s right ankle after the man was strapped into the electric chair and masked, and later giving the quiet signal for the executioner to throw the switch.
Doubts began to follow him home. One case in particular, that of Leo Jones, who was convicted of killing a Jacksonville police officer, troubled him. Jones maintained he was innocent and said his confession was coerced. McAndrew studied the case and concluded the investigation was seriously flawed, but a superior told him that reviewing the evidence was not his role. Jones was executed in 1998.
McAndrew began seeing the executed men at night, sitting silently at the foot of his bed, their stares seeming to ask how a man who saw himself as good could help kill them. He slept little, drank heavily, and at one point considered suicide, crediting his wife Lynne with saving him.
The worst experience came in March 1997 with the execution of Pedro Medina, who also claimed innocence. After McAndrew gave the signal, there was a popping noise, flames burst near Medina’s head, and black smoke filled the chamber. An electrician asked whether to proceed, and McAndrew answered yes. He calls that one word among the greatest regrets of his life. The odor of burning flesh spread through the prison into the death-row cellblock. Although an autopsy found that Medina died painlessly, McAndrew strongly disagrees, based on what he saw.
Florida later shifted away from routine use of the electric chair, and McAndrew was sent to Texas to observe lethal injection, in which he also took part. He had expected it to be gentler, but concluded it was violent and disturbing too. By retirement he felt emotionally shattered and full of regret.
Instead of trying to bury these memories, he decided they had a purpose. He speaks publicly about what he witnessed and assists death-row inmates and their lawyers with capital cases, saying he has helped some avoid execution. Now in his late eighties, he still receives letters from prisoners seeking help with appeals and new-evidence claims.
The experience changed how he sees his former certainty. He learned that inherited beliefs can go unexamined until someone must face their consequences firsthand, and the phrase that once gave him moral assurance no longer settles the question for him after seeing the terror, suffering, doubt, and psychological toll around executions. He also learned from the possibility of error: even those carrying out a sentence can come across evidence that makes guilt look less certain than the verdict claims, and an execution cannot be undone. And he learned that killing harms the people ordered to do it as well, as his own years of nightmares, drinking, guilt, and therapy showed.
His last lesson seems to be about redemption. Rather than erasing his past, he chooses to remember and speak about it, feeling obligated to tell others exactly what he experienced. “I’m not finished yet,” he says.
Now Catholic, McAndrew believes in an afterlife. As a thunderstorm rolled over his Florida home near the end of the interview, he thought about the prisoners whose deaths remain so vivid to him. “There’s a lot of people waiting on me there,” he said.
[SD note: Two lethal injections were scheduled for Sept. 29, including a 77-year-old, the 16th this year in that state. Prayer need.]