Little Rest, or Peace, for Texas Executioners
Huntsville death chamber is nation's busiest
Sara Rimer / New York Times
Jim Willett, Huntsville, Texas Executioner & Warden Huntsville, Texas -- Jim Willett, the warden of the prison here, awakened a little before 5 a. m. on Dec. 5 in his home, which his wife, Janice, had decorated for Christmas. He had not been looking forward to the day.
"My first thought was 'Today's an execution,' " he recalled later that morning. " 'I wonder what he'll be like.' "
Willett said he was hoping that the man who was to be put to death shortly after 6 p.m. would not resist and that the execution would proceed smoothly. Willett's job requires him to stand at the head of the person strapped on the gurney and to signal the anonymous executioner in the next room to inject the sedative and two lethal chemicals through a syringe. In his two and a half years as warden, Willett has given the signal -- raising his glasses -- that has killed 84 people.
"Just from a Christian standpoint, you can't see one of these and not consider that maybe it's not right," said Willett, 50.
It is the worst part of his job, he said, but it is his job just the same.
Now the prison, known as the Huntsville unit, was about to execute three men in three days. While that is not an unusual week for Huntsville, the United States' busiest death chamber, it would bring the year's total to 40, the most people legally killed by any state in one year in U.S. history, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington.
Those who champion the death penalty, the law-enforcement officials who call for it, the juries who vote for it, the judges who uphold it, the pardon boards and the governors who sign off on it, are not the ones who walk into the death chamber and help end lives.
That task falls to Willett and a dozen or so members of his staff: husbands and fathers who coach baseball, go fishing, attend church and lead mostly ordinary lives except when it comes time to lead the condemned to a 9-by-12- foot room deep inside the prison, and secure them to a gurney with eight mustard-colored leather straps so that they can be injected with the drugs that will kill them.
The first lethal injection in the country was performed in that room in 1982, and with the three executions in the week of Dec. 3 the total number rose to 239, more than half of them in the last four years.
These men do their jobs in a town and a state that ardently support the death penalty. But in the week of the three executions they shared their usually unspoken doubts, including their uneasiness with the detachment that allows them to go about their work.
Kenneth Dean, 37, is the head of the tie-down team, which does exactly what the name implies. A shy, burly man, Dean has performed that job about 130 times. He does not like to keep count.
On Tuesday morning, Dec. 5, he had made plans with his children -- Kourtney,
7, and Kevin, 13 -- for the evening. Recently divorced, he spends a couple of hours with them on Tuesday nights.
"I told them, 'Daddy has to work late tonight, he has an execution.' " Lately, Dean said, his daughter has been asking a lot of questions: " 'What is an execution? What do you do?'
"It's hard explaining to a 7-year-old," he added.
From all reports, Garry Miller, 33, a former bartender who was to be put to death on Dec. 5 for the 1989 rape and murder of 7-year-old April Marie Wilson, was not going to give them any trouble. He had told his lawyers not to file any further appeals. He said he was ready to die.
At 6:07 p.m., Dean escorted members of the victim's family, several prison officials and reporters down a long corridor and past a steel door into what is known as the death house: eight cells and the death chamber.
The witnesses stared through a large, barred window into the death chamber. Miller, a big man with glasses and an inmate's pasty skin, was lying on the gurney, with a Bible on his chest, under a white sheet. He had an IV in each wrist. The IVs are always inserted before the witnesses are brought in. Miller's head rested on a pillow.
The warden stood just behind Miller's head. The prison chaplain, Jim Brazzil, was at his feet.
Miller looked straight at Marjorie Howlett, the mother of the little girl he had killed, who was crying. They had known each other before the murder.
"Maggie, I am sorry," Miller said through a microphone above his head. "I always wanted to tell you, but I just didn't know how."
He said a brief prayer and told the warden he was ready. The warden raised his glasses. At 6:23 p.m., a doctor came into the room and pronounced Miller dead.
After the witnesses filed out, the tie-down team re-entered the death chamber, unfastened the straps around Miller's body, and transferred him to another gurney. The body was loaded into a waiting hearse and taken away. The death certificate would read: "State-ordered legal homicide."
About 15 minutes later, as part of the execution-night ritual, Howlett was seated in the office across from the prison, answering reporters' questions. "I'm very glad I came," she said. "I had to see him gone."
By 7 p.m., an exhausted Dean was across town, sitting with his children in his car in the driveway of his former wife. His daughter was on his lap. "She said, 'Do you have another one tomorrow?' " Dean recalled later. "I said, 'Yes,
I have one for the next two days.'
"She said, 'Why do you have so many this week?' I said, 'I don't know, sweetie.' "
Dean, who is a Baptist, says he prays before and after every execution. He did not tell his daughter about his own questions. "All of us wonder if it's right," he said earlier in the day. "You know, there's a higher judgment than us. You second-guess yourself. I know how I feel, but is it the right way to feel? Is what we do right? But if we didn't do it, who would do it?"
The maximum-security Huntsville unit, built in 1848, takes up two blocks in the middle of this East Texas town of 35,000 people. Its red-brick walls are 30 feet high; hence its nickname, The Walls. A Christmas sign, a herd of reindeer and a string of Christmas lights decorate the front wall.
The business of Huntsville is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, known as the TDCJ, which has its headquarters there. There are seven prisons in the area, housing about 13,400 inmates. The prison containing death row, where there are 443 condemned people, is in Livingston, 40 miles away. They are brought here on the afternoon of their execution and spend their final hours in a death-house cell.
It is better, Dean said, that the death-row inmates are in Livingston. That way, he said, he and his fellow officers are not helping execute people they know.
On Dec. 6, Dean was talking of how he sometimes worried about his own detachment. "That was one part I had to deal with," he said. "You expect to feel a certain way; then you think, 'Is there something wrong with me that I don't?' Then after a while you get to think, 'Why isn't this bothering me?' It is such a clinical process. You expect the worst with death, but you don't see the worst in death."
The detachment Dean describes is not only common among those who participate in executions, but necessary for them to be able to do their jobs, said Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who, with Greg Mitchell, wrote about such people in a new book, "Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience and the End of Executions."
"It violates a profound human reluctance to kill, and they must overcome it, " Lifton said. The clinical nature of lethal injections makes it easier to kill. "You have the ultimate form of medicalization, which enables those carrying out the execution in many cases to feel very little," Lifton said. "It also mutes it for the society at large."
Shortly before 1 p.m. Dean and Terry Green, another member of the tie-down team, were awaiting the arrival of Daniel Hittle, a 50-year-old former welder, who was to be executed that evening for the 1989 murder of a Garland police officer, Gerald Walker.
The prison world is one in which it is difficult to refuse a request from a superior, but turning down an invitation to serve on the death team is one refusal that is acceptable, Dean and Green said. Those who participate in executions must be at the rank of sergeant or above, which means there is a pool of about 25 people. Several have declined. "No one looks down on them," said Green, 48, a captain who has been a member of the tie-down team for two years.
There is no extra pay for executions.
Dean said he had thought long and hard about his stand on the death penalty before he said "yes" 10 years ago to a supervisor's request that he join the team. "I researched it," he said. "I spoke to pastors to make sure I wasn't misinterpreting what the Bible said about the death penalty."
Green nodded. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," he said, paraphrasing Matthew 22:22. To Green, who is a Baptist, that passage means that the law should be upheld, and in Texas the law requires that some people be executed for their crimes. Green says he sees the tie-down team as upholding the law.
Hittle's execution went smoothly. When it was over, the widow of the murdered officer, Beckie Walker, left without talking to reporters. Jimmie George, an officer with the Garland Police Department, released a statement.
"The death of Daniel Hittle does not bring Gerald back," it said, but would "guarantee that no police officer will ever face the danger of dealing with him again."
The following day, Dec. 7, the warden was in a reflective mood.
"I don't really know how I feel about this," Willett said. "The sad thing is we end up with more victims, like the inmate's mother. Can you imagine watching your son die?
"On the other hand," he added, "I can understand why she's there."
Relatives of the condemned can witness the execution, and many times the warden has looked on as the mother of the man on the gurney watched her son take his last breath. None of the mothers or fathers of the three condemned men were there.
It looked as though the third execution was going to hold to the routine. Shortly before noon, Willett's secretary, Kim Huff, had an update on Claude Jones, who was to be executed for the 1989 armed robbery and murder of a liquor-store owner, Allen Hilzendager, 44, in the town of Point Blank.
"He says he doesn't want a damn stay; he's 60 years old, he's ready to go," Huff said.
The warden left to meet his wife for a rare lunch out. When Willett got up from the table to greet friends, his wife talked about the toll the job takes on him.
"I was so worried about him a few weeks ago," she said, referring to her husband's reaction to a man he had helped kill recently. "He said, 'I met one of the nicest men I've ever met today.' I thought, 'Oh, he's fixing to break.' "
The usually easygoing and genial warden did not break. But after nearly 30 years with TDCJ, Willett is looking forward to his retirement early next year, when he said he could stop "messing with these executions."
That day, the odds caught up with the warden and the others. The third execution did not go smoothly. It was delayed by about 30 minutes while the medical team struggled to insert an IV into a vein of Jones, who had been a longtime intravenous drug user.
Leaving the prison at about 7 p.m., Dean looked drained.
"They had to stick him about five times," he said. "They finally put it in his leg."
Hilzendager's sister, Gayle Currie, witnessed the execution. "It gave me a peace of mind to know that he will never hurt anyone again," Currie said afterward.
Larry Fitzgerald, a prison spokesman whose job requires him to witness every execution, was visibly relieved. "This is the best day of the year for me," he said. "I don't have any more executions this year. I've had it. Forty is a lot." He had now witnessed 144 executions in five years.
"It bothers me," said Fitzgerald, 63, "that I don't remember all their names."
The executions will start again in January. Three more are scheduled for that month.
