Former Warden Reconsiders Executions

Here inside these tall prison walls, in this little room, sodium pentathol was easing into Cannon's veins and shutting down his central nervous system. Firing neurons and twitching muscles slowed as the drug put him to sleep. Then came the pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant. His diaphragm ceased its up-and-down motion, and the muscles covering his rib cage froze, paralyzed. As Cannon let out his last breath, there was a snoring sound, like the air escaping from a balloon.

Willett waited three minutes, just like he'd been told to, and called in the doctor. Joseph John Cannon was pronounced dead at 7:28 p.m. and wheeled out of the room.

Minutes later Willett sat down to dinner with his wife. He was quiet, sitting at the dining room table pushing food around on his plate with a fork. "I didn't want to prod," Janice recalls. "So we just talked about other things."

Later, he told her about the IV blowout. "You're not going to believe what happened," he said. "If anything could go wrong, of course it would be my first night." Before he went to bed, he recorded the day's events in his journal, a ritual that he would continue after every execution to come.

"I know that I'll never want to do this, but I can hope that my next execution, and all the ones that follow, will go better," he wrote in his journal, parts of which were later published in a book called Warden: Prison Life and Death From the Inside Out. "Soon we'll move into the warden's residence, which is located just outside the Walls, not far from the number one picket, which hovers over the death house. The place where I will eat with my family, where I will joke with my kids and watch mindless TV shows with my wife, lies about 50 feet from where I take off my glasses and shut down a human life."

To most people, raising a family on the prison grounds would seem grim and dangerous. But for the Willetts it was normal–and an opportunity to set an example of family for people who had lost their way and wound up behind bars. Their children, Jacob and Jordan, were young adults by the time Willett took the warden post that required him to manage the executions. By then, they'd spent the better part of their lives living next door to the prison.

"We got to see different cultures of people, different sides of people that other kids don't get to experience," says Jacob, 26. "I can get along with just about anybody."

When he and his older sister Jordan were growing up, the prison system allowed well-behaved inmates to work on the grounds near their house, doing landscaping and odd jobs. When Jacob was 5, he would sometimes play with an inmate named Donald. "Once he snuck some Ding Dongs out of the prison and brought them out to the house, and we shared one," Jacob recalls. When he was older, he'd play catch with a middle-aged prisoner named Hines. The man had been in and out of prison for some 40 years, and when he got out, he sent Jacob a letter listing "the top 10 things you can do to enhance the quality of your life through God." Jacob still keeps it tucked in his Bible. "I treated him like just another person," he says. "They're human beings too, and a lot of people don't look at it like that."

When his sister was little, she grew close to an inmate named Stafford who worked in the yard. Janice recalls that he had gorgeous handwriting and could make anything out of scrap. "One year he made little wooden pumpkins for every child in Jordan's class–he painted them and put their names on every one," she says. "They were beautiful. They'd make something for every holiday." After he got out of prison, Stafford came by the house and gave Jordan a present. He died a month later. "He'd gotten home from work, lay down on the couch and had a stroke. He wasn't even 50," Janice says. "That was a tough one–he'd been around for a long time."

Janice kept an eye on the kids when they were with the inmates, and she always had a rule for the men: If my children ask you why you're here, tell them the truth. "Don't blame someone else," she says she told them. "That was very important to me. I didn't want them to feel sorry and think these guys didn't do something wrong. They just learned that these people are people, and they do have lives. They knew these guys had done something wrong to get there and that when they got their life turned around they had an opportunity to go back out and live with the rest of us."