WASHINGTON — "I can see their faces in my nightmares," said Allen Ault, a former Georgia prison warden among a growing number of ex-jailers and executioners opposed to the death penalty in the United States.
Across the country, prison workers who once supported the death penalty are beginning to lend their voices, alongside other prominent figures, to the campaign to abolish capital punishment in favor of life imprisonment.
In his role as the director of the Georgia Department of Corrections in the 1990s, Ault supervised five executions in a death row that he had built 20 years earlier.
Ault would give the order to pull the switch on death row inmates strapped to an electric chair.
It is "the most premeditated murder that one can do, there's no other way to describe it," Ault said, calling putting inmates to death an "inhumane job for people who have a conscience and who value life."
He was among six retired prison wardens who urged Georgia officials -- in vain -- to try to halt the execution of Troy Davis, an African American who was put to death in September for killing a white off-duty police officer in 1989.
During his career as Florida prison system warden, Ron McAndrew escorted three prisoners to the electric chair, and five others to the death chamber in Texas to be executed by lethal injection.
One day in 1997, the Florida electric chair, known as "Old Sparky," malfunctioned. "We had a fire, it was horrible -- we literally burnt him to death," said McAndrew.
McAndrew is still tormented by memories of telling the technician to continue with the electric charge despite the mishap.
"This work is too dirty, we have become barbarians," he told AFP.
Reginald Wilkinson, who once served as director of Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said "it's time... to evolve to a sophisticated society that would allow that life without parole would be a punishment equal to capital punishment."
"I had the responsibility to carry out the law," said Wilkinson, who eventually became an anti-death penalty activist.
Prosecutors, governors -- such as Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon -- and even judges, such as Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and fellow retired justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor, are raising doubts about the death penalty.
"We see new voices, we've seen much change in the leadership, more people are speaking up," said Steve Hall with The StandDown Texas Project, which advocates eliminating the death penalty in the southern state.
According to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, the number of executions and death penalty sentences has dropped 75 percent in the past 15 years to its lowest level since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated in the United States.
There were 78 death sentences imposed in 2011 -- the first time in 35 years the number has fallen below 100, the center said in its annual report.
The number of executions has also fallen to 43 in 2011, down from 46 in 2010, and down by half compared to 1999, which registered the highest number since 1976.
Some 61 percent of the US public still favors of the death penalty, according to an October Gallup poll, among the lowest level support for legal executions since 1972.
Forty percent of Americans also say the death penalty is not imposed enough -- which Gallup says is the lowest percentage since May 2001.
For things to change "it's going to take a lot of people with their voices to express their opinion," Wilkinson said.
Former US president Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Pope Benedict XVI were among those who weighed in on Davis's behalf in a racially charged case that spanned two decades. His execution marked a turning point among many who follow the issue in the United States.
"Why rush to execution when you have lot of that doubt?" asked Ault.
"Capital punishment is bad all the time, but to execute someone when there are doubts, it's an ultimate insult for society," he said. "It seems so hypocritical to say we would deter some murders by murdering somebody."
Since 1976, 139 inmates have been found innocent and been released from death row, averaging now at around five cases a year.
"In the US, we have replaced justice with vengeance," said McAndrew. "When it comes to capital punishment, it's very scary, all you need is a person to point his finger at you."
McAndrew still recalls a chance encounter at a Florida airport with a death penalty inmate who had been reprieved and was eventually released.
"He recognized me -- he put his arm around me," said McAndrew. "The last time I saw him, he was in death row in Florida and I was warden.
"I could have possibly extracted this man out of his cell, brought him to the death chamber and put him to death when in fact he was totally innocent. He served almost 20 years for a crime he had not committed."
Source: Agence France-Presse, December 20, 2011
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