A former senior prison warden outlined the “worst part of his job”, signalling for those on death row to be executed. Despite being a devout Christian, Jim Willet took the job at America’s busiest death chamber housed at Huntsville Unit in Texas.
“I think if I had my choice, growing up, I’d have been a farmer,” Mr Willet told the New York Times.
Instead, he ended up overseeing America’s busiest execution chamber at Huntsville which saw 528 executions between 1982 and 2015. Mr Willet presided over 89 of those during his career.
He first applied for a job at Huntsville when he was 21 and was given a job in the Walls Unit which houses the execution chambers. However, Mr Willet began his career as a guard in one of the prison’s watch towers.
“It was me and a pistol and a shotgun, and I was praying that no inmates tried to escape,” he said.
He spent the next thirteen years at Walls gaining promotions. The future warden even met his wife there – she worked for Texas Commission for the Blind which had an office in the prison to deal with blind inmates.
He was promoted to assistant warden and worked in prisons around Texas, but in 1998 he was offered the job of senior warden at Walls. However, knowing what the job would entail, he declined.
“I didn’t want to deal with the executions,” he said. However, after a second offer Mr Willet couldn’t justify giving up the extra cash.
He said: “Somebody was going to have to deal with those inmates. And I felt like those inmates couldn’t have anybody better to deal with than me.”
Once in the job, he admitted that giving the signal for the executioner to administer the lethal injection was the “worst part of his job”.
“Just from a Christian standpoint, you can’t see one of these [executions] and not consider that maybe it’s not right,” he said.
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