Haunted by the death penalty
After a series of exonerations and botched executions, prison officials are increasingly reluctant to do the killing, said Isaac Willour in The Dispatch. Just participating leaves many with PTSD.
RON MCANDREW’S THIRD execution was the last he would ever oversee.
On March 25, 1997, McAndrew, then the warden of the Florida State Prison in Raiford, watched as guards escorted Pedro Medina into the death chamber at the prison and strapped him into “Old Sparky,” the electric chair that had been in use since 1923. Medina had been convicted of the gruesome 1982 murder of Dorothy James, a 51-yearold elementary school teacher. “I am still innocent,” Medina said when asked for his last words. Guards strapped his limbs into the chair, placed a salinesoaked sponge atop Medina’s head, then latched an electrode on top of the sponge, followed by a copper helmet, and finally a mask over his face.
At a secret signal from McAndrew, the executioner flipped on the electrical current and Medina’s body jerked back as the fatal charge entered his body. Then it all went wrong.
The sponge—which had been wrung too dry of the saline solution that should have conducted the electrical current into Medina’s head—caught fire. Blue and orange flames shot from Medina’s masked head. Smoke filled the execution chamber. So did the smell of burning flesh. “They’re burning him alive,” said attorney Michael Minerva, one of the execution’s observers.
More than 25 years later, McAndrew agreed: “We burned a man to death.”
As the execution went wrong, McAndrew had to decide whether to stop and retry or continue. “You have to put on a good show because there are a lot of people watching,” he said. “You can’t show any fear, hesitation, weakness of any kind.” He decided to continue with a second electrical charge of a lower voltage. Four minutes later, Medina was pronounced dead.
After the Medina execution and public outcry, Gov. Lawton Chiles sent McAndrew to Huntsville, Texas, to learn more about lethal injections, but that’s when he began rethinking his position on the death penalty. The trauma of the Medina execution and personal connections with death row inmates began weighing on the Air Force veteran. “You get to know them and then, one day, you go up and read them a death warrant,” he said. “The mother shows you a picture of them as a high school boy on the basketball team. They’re human beings. They’re not just objects or numbers.”
McAndrew began having nightmares in which he saw the men he’d executed sitting on his bed, staring at him. He turned to pills and alcohol. He would eventually begin therapy, give up his addictions, and transfer to a different prison in Orlando. But first came one day in 1998. “I woke up and said, ‘The death penalty is wrong.’” He called his superiors with one request: “Get me the hell out of here.”
THOUGH IT EBBS and flows, debate over the death penalty in the U.S. never really cools off. Support for it dipped as low as 42 percent in May 1966 and climbed as high as 80 percent in September 1994, according to Gallup polling. Gallup puts current support for the death penalty at 54 percent, while Pew puts it at 60 percent.
In 2022, fewer than 50 defendants were sentenced to death and only 20 executions were carried out in only six states. Part of this could be the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic: 2020 saw 17 executions and 2021 saw 11. Both years saw only 18 death sentences handed out by courts.
The death penalty is significantly more expensive than any comparable penal alternative: The cost of a single execution can stretch into the millions. In Texas, the average death penalty case costs $2.3 million, three times more than imprisoning an inmate in maximum security for 40 years. The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) estimated that in 2000 Florida spent $51 million more in administering the death penalty than it would have punishing all first-degree murderers with life without parole.
Plus, there are the extended appeals processes, increased costs for legal counsel, and expert witnesses—which more and more defendants seem to understand. Robert Dunham, a onetime defender who worked on capital cases and the former director of DPIC, pointed out the importance of proper representation in capital cases: “If you’re well represented, you don’t get the death penalty.”
Apart from the fluctuation in data, however, the national conversation over the death penalty is changing in other ways. More and more stories of faulty convictions come to light, possibly swaying public opinion. But so do stories of how the death penalty affects attorneys, judges, and the people tasked with carrying out executions.
IN 2002, RAY Krone became the 100th death row inmate exonerated since the Supreme Court ruled executions were constitutional in 1976 after the four-year halt imposed by the court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia.
On Dec. 29, 1991, a friend of the then– 34-year-old Krone, Kim Ancona, was found naked and stabbed to death in the men’s bathroom of the Phoenix bar where she worked. A single beer, a glass, and Ancona’s pocketbook were sitting on the bar next to the bar’s open cash drawer. The knife used to kill the 21-year-old woman was found nearby, bent from the impact of multiple stab wounds.
Someone alerted the police that Krone had helped Ancona close the bar the previous night, so they asked Krone for a Styrofoam impression of his teeth to compare with bite marks on Ancona’s body. Two days later, police charged Krone with murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault despite a witness giving a physical description of a suspect who didn’t resemble Krone.