Former prison warden haunted by those he executed

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.”

...

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.

 

Yet another death row inmate found innocent through DNA evidence

Jonathan M. Katz and Erik Eckholm in Brothers freed after 30 years in jail amid new DNA evidence
describe a sad case of injustice:

Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and released on Tuesday by a Robeson County court.

The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man with a history of rape and murder.

Chris Berg on mandatory sentencing

Chris Berg has some interesting things to say on the problems of mandatory sentencing in Mandatory sentencing: a king hit for courts.

Executing an innocent man - another Texan case

In The wrong Carlos: how Texas sent an innocent man to his death Ed Pilkington writes about the case of Carlos DeLuna who was executed in 1989 in Texas. Thanks to the work of Professor James Liebman and the Columbia Human Rights Law Review it now appears almost certain that DeLuna was innocent and that the murder was committed by "a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez".

Capital Punishment

Georgia has just executed Troy Davis despite wide spread doubts about his guilt. The Daily Beast has a primer on the case.

Capital punishment has been in the news in the USA recently due to the Davis case and Texas Governor Rick Perry's bid for the US Presidency. In 2004 Perry denied an appeal by Cameron Todd Willingham who was then executed despite scientific evidence that the conviction was flawed. It's then alleged that Perry obstructed a subsequent investigation into the case. The New Yorker published an excellent article on the case. Although long it is well worth the read.

If you don't have time to read the New Yorker's piece then try reading this summary at the LA Times or this Salon interview with a co-director of a documentary on the case. To quote from the LA Times article:

Perry, who may soon announce his presidential bid, oversaw the 2004 execution of Willingham, a father of three convicted for the apparent arson murder of his young daughters. Problem was, the evidence used to prove Willingham set the fire that killed his children was based on shoddy science and obsolete investigation techniques, facts that were brought to Perry's attention before Willingham's death. Declaring his innocence to the end, Willingham was executed 12 years after his children's deaths.

Edit 29/9: Time have an interesting article on the unreliability of witness testimony.

Edit 11/3/2015:  An article claiming a key witness in the Willingham case was pressured to lie in return for a reduced sentence.