Former Warden Reconsiders Executions

For Jacob, knowing that the men his father had a hand in putting to death had committed horrible crimes enabled him to accept capital punishment as part of his father's job and a logical consequence of unspeakable actions. "A lot of those guys don't get put in that position for something they did right," he tells me. "They don't get put in that position unless they've done something that's completely inhumane. I don't think that as human beings we have the right to judge, but if they do those things they've got to have some kind of consequence."

Janice, who seems to have more ethical concerns about the death penalty than her son, echoes Jacob's thoughts about her husband's job as warden and her belief that God had a hand in leading him to it. "It was interesting to me that those three years were the [death chamber's] busiest," she says. There were times during those years that three inmates were put to death in one week, sometimes two in the same day. "If there was going to be a time in our history when you would need someone who's a humble person who treats everyone with respect whether they're inside the bars or not, he does." This, she says, is why even though he was reluctant, Willett continued to give the prison system his time. "I always envision Jim as this horse, trying to slow down from going over a cliff," she says. "He never really wanted to move up in the system; he was always saying, 'Whoa.' [Criminal justice] was a profession for me; it was a job for him. But he was good at it."

Willett stresses that his first priority was always his family. "Working at the prison was something I did eight hours a day so I could do what I wanted the other 16," he says. "I liked my job, but it wasn't my favorite thing in life." Jacob was an avid baseball player, and Willett asked his supervisors not to schedule an execution on game days. "He made it very clear to everyone that when there was a game, he was going to be there," Janice says. "He got an award our son's senior year in high school for being the only parent who never missed a game."

The day Gary Graham was executed and troops of media and protesters camped out in front of the prison, Jacob was working at a nearby bar. Sports was on one TV and the news was on another, showing Jesse Jackson standing on the steps of the Walls amid hundreds of protesters. At one point, Jacob caught a glimpse of his father standing outside the prison. Jacob's boss came in and said there were several calls for him. One was a scout with good news: He'd been drafted by the Yankees (he decided to go to college instead). The other calls were from local reporters.

Then, Jim Willett, having stepped away from the melee for a moment to use the phone, called to congratulate him. "He told me he loved me, that he was proud of me," Jacob says.

While he has had brief conversations with his father about the executions, it's not something he likes to bring up. "If he has bad recollections about it, I don't want to be the one to talk about it," he says. "I'd much rather talk about baseball or something."

If Willett struggled to cope with the impact of presiding over the deaths of 89 people and being there for their last moments, he didn't talk about it much to anyone. "Jim's pretty unflappable­–whatever turmoil he's feeling inside, he's not going to show that," says Wayne Scott, Willett's old friend. "Jim was much more concerned about his staff than he was about himself–that's just the sort of person he is." Willett was careful to rotate officers involved in the executions as much as he could, giving them breaks. And he always made sure they knew there were counselors available if they needed to talk.

In 2000, when Texas set a record for the number of inmates put to death in one year–40–Willett and his employees participated in a National Public Radio documentary called Witness to an Execution. He ended up narrating it himself, and the haunting and evocative piece won a Peabody Award.