Former Warden Reconsiders Executions

Willett nodded.

The woman left, leaving just Willett, the chaplain and Cannon in the room. Cannon looked at the IV in his arm, then turned his head to watch through the plate glass window as the witnesses walked into the viewing gallery.

Willett observed a woman enter the viewing area and come to a halt when she saw Cannon lying on the gurney. Willett guessed she was his mother. Cannon looked at her, expressionless. Somebody behind her touched her shoulder, and she moved closer to the glass.

On the other side of a thin wall in the viewing area, five members of the victim's family gathered.

All of the witnesses stood; a dozen sets of eyes peered through the glass into the death chamber.

For his last statement, Cannon rambled in a nervous voice about his victim, his family and his crime, most of it jumbled together in an awkward rush of words. Then he shook his head and closed his eyes. The chaplain rested his hand on Cannon's ankle. As if in slow motion, Willett lifted his reading glasses from his nose, the signal for the hidden executioner to start the first of the three fluids flowing. As he gave the sign, he prayed. Lord, have mercy on this man's soul. It was silent. So quiet Willett could hear the liquids moving through the IV line.

And then he heard a voice: "Warden." He looked at the chaplain, trying to figure out who spoke, then down at Cannon.

"Warden," the inmate said again. "It fell out."

Willett looked at the man's arm. Sure enough, the needle was spilling its contents onto the sheets.

Willett ran over to the window and tugged at the curtain, trying to shield the witnesses. The fabric came unhooked from the rod. Standing on the other side using the drawstring, the chaplain managed to cover the glass. Someone was crying, probably Cannon's mother.

What a nightmare. Willett had never heard of this happening before. In fact, 10 years before there had been a somewhat spectacular IV "blowout," complete with liquids spraying around the room and onto the viewing glass. But no one had told him about that one. The medical staff came in again and hooked up the IV for the second time. The curtains were opened, and Willett asked Cannon if he wanted to make another statement. This time, the inmate was more assured, clearer. He looked at the victim's daughter and said he was sorry.

Again, Willett lifted his glasses. And again, the silence and flowing liquids.

Outside the prison, people milled around Main Street, men got off work, mothers picked up children from ballet and soccer, and Willett's own wife made dinner.

Here inside these tall prison walls, in this little room, sodium pentathol was easing into Cannon's veins and shutting down his central nervous system. Firing neurons and twitching muscles slowed as the drug put him to sleep. Then came the pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant. His diaphragm ceased its up-and-down motion, and the muscles covering his rib cage froze, paralyzed. As Cannon let out his last breath, there was a snoring sound, like the air escaping from a balloon.

Then, to finish the job, the potassium chloride trickled through the line. It's the drug that stops the heart.

Willett waited three minutes, just like he'd been told to, and called in the doctor. Joseph John Cannon was pronounced dead at 7:28 p.m. and wheeled out of the room.

Minutes later Willett sat down to dinner with his wife. He was quiet, sitting at the dining room table pushing food around on his plate with a fork. "I didn't want to prod," Janice recalls. "So we just talked about other things."

Later, he told her about the IV blowout. "You're not going to believe what happened," he said. "If anything could go wrong, of course it would be my first night." Before he went to bed, he recorded the day's events in his journal, a ritual that he would continue after every execution to come.

"I know that I'll never want to do this, but I can hope that my next execution, and all the ones that follow, will go better," he wrote in his journal, parts of which were later published in a book called Warden: Prison Life and Death From the Inside Out. "Soon we'll move into the warden's residence, which is located just outside the Walls, not far from the number one picket, which hovers over the death house. The place where I will eat with my family, where I will joke with my kids and watch mindless TV shows with my wife, lies about 50 feet from where I take off my glasses and shut down a human life."

To most people, raising a family on the prison grounds would seem grim and dangerous. But for the Willetts it was normal–and an opportunity to set an example of family for people who had lost their way and wound up behind bars. Their children, Jacob and Jordan, were young adults by the time Willett took the warden post that required him to manage the executions. By then, they'd spent the better part of their lives living next door to the prison.