Former Warden Reconsiders Executions

Willett may be certain that Graham was justly convicted, but is he so sure that all the men whose deaths he witnessed were guilty? Does he think any of the 89 may have been innocent? "I would hope not, with all of the appeals, the process that takes years and the judges and everybody looking at it," he says. "But I'm also clear that you're going to have mistakes if humans are messing with it–it's just a fact."

Indeed, a shameful array of legal blunders has been uncovered through DNA testing, especially in Texas, which leads the country in the number of people freed after biological evidence proved their innocence. Dallas County, meanwhile, has a greater number of DNA exonerations than any other jurisdiction in the nation. Some of the 13 Dallas inmates released since 2001 had been locked up for decades. I mention this, and Willett nods. "I think if we have DNA then we have to use it to prove the person did it–isn't that just logical?" he says. "I don't know why anyone involved on either side wouldn't want to do that."

Guilt or innocence aside, he says, watching each person die was wrenching. "The hardest were the young fellows–one was 29," he says. "They're like you–perfectly healthy, some have good personalities. You think, there's a young man who ruined someone's life and ruined his own, and he probably could have really been something. These are people who might have gone a different direction. If they'd been with a different crowd, maybe they wouldn't be lying here tonight."

When Willett was hired as a Huntsville prison guard in 1971, he took a tour of the units. He felt nervous and jumpy as he followed a captain through crowds of convicts in white uniforms. The inmates looked him up and down, sizing him up. He tried not to meet their gaze. Growing up in the nearby town of Groesbeck, he'd heard prisons were sad, rough places, full of long days of loneliness and backbreaking work. The only person he knew who'd gone to the pen was the father of a kid he'd known growing up. The man had been caught stealing cattle. Back then, Willett never expected to spend time in a prison. He'd been working at a gas station while attending Sam Houston State University, and he heard that guard jobs paid better. That's how he wound up sitting in a guard tower on a muggy summer night, looking out over the prison yard. His perch on the No. 1 picket was on the northeast corner of the Walls, the unit named for the red brick walls that reach 30 feet high. The picket was right over the death house and the warden's residence next door. Willett couldn't imagine that nearly three decades later, he would live there with his family.

When I ask Willett what his reaction would have been had someone told him he would spend the next 30 years of his life in prisons, he thinks for a moment. "I'd have been really sad," he says. "It wasn't what I wanted to do. The first six months it was as boring as life could be, alone out there on the picket at night. Then I got switched to the day shift, and it went by faster." Though he had been raised in a farming family–his mother's parents were illiterate Polish immigrants who grew tomatoes and sold them in nearby towns–his dreams of working the land had given way to an interest in business and ideas of sitting in an office somewhere. But by the time he graduated with a business degree from Sam Houston, he was comfortable working in the prison and continued to be rewarded with promotions.

One day in the late '70s, not long after he made lieutenant, Willett was introduced to Janice Joiner, a pretty blond criminal justice major. They married a year later at the clubhouse of the women's penitentiary on the outskirts of Huntsville. Their elaborate wedding cake and flower arrangements were made by female inmates in vocational classes. The couple moved into a two-story state residence that backed up to the Walls. On their wedding night, throngs of people streamed onto the grounds for the prison rodeo, a Texas tradition that drew thousands of spectators each year. Janice had worked in the prison and wasn't terribly frightened to live near it, but the transition wasn't seamless. "I wake up and Jim's working and I'm a bride and there's hundreds of people in our yard, inmates handing out programs," she says. "I walked back to my apartment that was empty and just cried." She soon grew accustomed to prison life. "I always felt very safe," she says. "Right outside our bedroom window was a picket."

As the years went on, they had two children, Janice worked as a probation officer and Jim kept getting promoted. He had the rare combination of compassion, take-charge leadership skill and social ease that inspires trust and earns the respect and allegiance of other men. By the 1990s, he was an assistant warden. And then one day in 1998 he got a phone call.