“I don’t think it’s morally right,” he says today. “I don’t think anyone has the right to kill another person unless it’s in self defense, defense of another person or in defense of their country.”
McAndrew will tell his story of conversion at St. Catherine of Alexandria Parish in Riverside on Oct. 23 at 6 p.m. in a discussion of the death penalty and Prop. 34. The state measure, on the Nov. 6 ballot, would replace the death penalty in California with a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. McAndrew will be joined by Jerry Givens, a former Virginia corrections officer who has also become a public advocate against the death penalty.
For McAndrew it took first-hand experience and participation in the death penalty process to open his eyes. He says he was raised to believe the death penalty was just and that people who were accused of a crime by authorities were generally guilty. After more than a decade as a corrections officer he was appointed warden of the largest prison in Florida.
A few years later he became warden of Florida State Prison where he presided over his first executions. He recalls telling the man who promoted him without hesitation that he would have “no problem” administering the death penalty. After his first execution, however, the doubts began to creep in.
“I sat on the edge of a bed with a man and read him his death warrant. Then I walked him down the hall and he was executed,” McAndrew said. “It was probably the dirtiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Following the botched execution of Medina, which ended death by electrocution in Florida, McAndrew was sent to Texas to be trained in the lethal injection method of execution. By that time he says he was experiencing psychological problems, insomnia and drinking too much alcohol as a result of his work. “My wife said I needed to get out of this killing business,” he recalls.
He was granted a transfer from Florida State Prison and no longer presided over executions, but he continued to wrestle with the morality of what he had done. He began to review the case files of death row inmates who had been on his watch and came to believe that the possibility of an innocent person being executed was greater than he ever thought. The faces of condemned men who he thinks may have been innocent haunt his memory still, he says.
“If you took a look at all of the people in this country who are on death row I think you’d find that many of them were put there through the testimony of people who have questionable motives,” he says.
As he came to believe that the death penalty is morally wrong, McAndrew also came to the Catholic faith. He had been raised Baptist in the Southern Bible Belt and admits that he “had God on the back burner” for much of his early adult life. But his wife was a cradle Catholic with a strong faith that eventually drew him in. It helped him come to terms with his time as an executioner.
“When all of this stuff started breaking loose I realized that I needed my faith to be whole,” he said.
McAndrew’s first public speech against the death penalty came at a Knights of Columbus gathering and he has told his story in more than 30 dioceses around the country.
Since his retirement in 2001, he has worked as a public advocate against the death penalty and as a private consultant to detention facilities. His talks touch on his personal experience with the death penalty, observations about the miscarriage of justice in death penalty cases and the argument that abolishing the death penalty makes financial sense. He says states can save $50-60 million a year by eliminating the death penalty and replacing it with life sentences without the possibility of parole. Materials from the official campaign group for Prop 34 state that Californians would save about $130 million a year if the death penalty were no longer used here.
The politicization of the issue by elected officials who believe that rhetoric about being tough on crime will win them votes has a negative impact on the public’s understanding of the death penalty, McAndrew says. Governors who green light executions are not present when the execution actually takes place, he notes.
“It’s his idea. It’s his signature that causes this to happen, but he’s never there,” McAndrew says. “A politician doesn’t have the right to tell someone to do this kind of work for him.”
Turning the tide of public opinion about the death penalty will hinge on more effective education about the issue, McAndrew says.
“I believe this should be taught as a subject in community colleges and universities,” he says. “People should be given the opportunity to see how this process really works, the imperfection of it.”