We talk about reports of botched lethal injections across the country. Does he think lethal injection is inhumane? "I don't think Texas has any problem with that," he says. "A medical person once told me we give 'em enough to put a horse to sleep." Willett avoids making political statements or taking a position for or against the death penalty. But he's unabashed in expressing his compassion for all of the people brought together in the execution process–those who perform the execution itself, the inmates and their victims, and the families who sit in the viewing gallery on either side of the wall.
"One night after an execution, the inmate had died and I called the doctor in," he tells me, standing in between Old Sparky and the case with the IV bag and syringes. "I move over and I'm facing these two [viewing] rooms. On one side of the wall was a daughter of the inmate, on the other side was the daughter of the victim, both deep in thought. And I thought, they don't even know the other is there. And what made it eerie was that they were both victims."
MARK GRAHAM
Jim Willet was warden of the Walls Unit for three years. The executions were never easy, he says. "The hardest were the young fellows. You think, there's a young man who ruined someone's life and ruined his own, and he probably could have really been something."
MARK GRAHAM
All executions in Texas since 1924 have been carried out in a small room in the state prison in Huntsville.
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Over the next two weeks, publications around the world will report that Texas, the epicenter of capital punishment, has put the brakes on its well-oiled death machine. On the day in late September when the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider the legality of lethal injection, several Texas inmates were scheduled for execution. A team of attorneys prepared an appeal for one of them based on the pending decision, but their computer reportedly crashed and while they were scrambling to fix it one of them called the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to say they would be a few minutes late and to please stay open. They were told no, and a few hours later, their client was dead. The other inmates, however, were granted stays, raising questions about a de facto moratorium even in the state of Texas.
If that happens, Willett wouldn't necessarily oppose it. "I do wonder sometimes, the people who are guilty of real violent murders or crimes against children, why do they deserve to live?" he says. "But maybe we don't have the right to ask that–I don't know. For me, it's up to the people of Texas, whatever they want to do. If they said, 'Let's not have executions,' I'd be fine with that."
