In He executed death row prisoners. Then they came back to haunt him Rob Picheta of CNN writes about the regrets of former prison warden Ron McAndrew who led the team that executed prisoners in Florida.
Every night, one of the men Ron McAndrew killed would sit at the foot of his bed and stare, blankly, into his tortured soul.
He knew they were coming. He’d shift over in his sheets to make room. “They never said anything,” McAndrew recalls, his aged voice straining from the weight of the memory. “They just sat there and looked at me.” But their eyes would talk.
They would ask: “How could you do such a thing?’” says McAndrew. “You always claimed to be a good person. And now you’re killing people.”
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McAndrew was the warden at Florida State Prison, the facility where the state executes its death row inmates, until 1998. He led a team that killed three prisoners by electrocution, then went to Texas to assist in the lethal injections of several more men. He became convinced that one of his inmates was innocent; another execution was botched, setting fire to an inmate’s head.
And he regrets it all. “I really believed in the death penalty,” he says. “I can’t believe that I did, today. I simply cannot believe it.”
Now 88, McAndrew has become an unlikely opponent of capital punishment. He is trying, with whatever time he has left, to right eight wrongs. “I had to look at myself,” he says on a recent sticky Florida afternoon. “You really start thinking about what you’ve done. Why you did it,” he says.
But his own state is working against him. Since the start of 2025, Florida has executed more people than any other state and nearly as many as the rest of the country combined.
