Texas warden was last voice heard by 140 inmates

mike r

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Tue Aug-31-10 01:43 PM
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Texas warden was last voice heard by 140 inmates

http://www.newschannel10.com/Global/story.asp?S=13074670

Texas warden was last voice heard by 140 inmates
By MICHAEL GRACZYK, Associated Press

HUNTSVILLE, Texas – For about 140 people over the past six years, the soft Texas drawl of Charles Thomas O'Reilly was the last voice they heard before they died. O'Reilly — who retired Monday from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit, where he presided over more lethal injections than any other warden — leaves with no reservations, no nightmares. "I don't have any intentions of changing my mind, reflecting on how could I have ever done this stuff," he said of the execution duty, which began for him in September 2004 when he took over the more than century-and-a-half-old 1,700-inmate penitentiary in downtown Huntsville. "If you think it's a terrible thing, you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. You don't do 140 executions and then all of a sudden think this was a bad thing."

O'Reilly, who turns 60 Wednesday, retired after more than 33 years with the Texas prison agency. On his last day, he looked like a warden from a Hollywood casting call: burly, white-haired, jeans, a western-style belt with a star dominating his buckle, a black shirt. He didn't keep an exact tally of the number of inmates he stood over as they were strapped to the gurney and prepared for injection. The 140 inmates whose executions he estimated he oversaw account for about a third of the 463 put to death since Texas resumed carrying out of capital punishment in 1982. Some did leave an impression, although the only name that came immediately to mind for O'Reilly was Frances Newton, who in 2005 became the third woman executed in Texas in modern times. She was the only woman executed under O'Reilly's watch. "One guy, he cracked jokes, he cracked jokes through the whole thing," O'Reilly said. "I can't remember his name. But I remember things like that."

While O'Reilly recalls the professionalism everyone shows throughout the process, it's the last words of the inmate that tend to draw considerable attention. With witnesses assembled and looking through windows, the chaplain normally offering a comforting hand resting on the inmate's leg and the final OK from a prison department executive, O'Reilly, standing near the prone inmate's head, leaned over. "I ask them: Do you wish to make a statement?" he said. "I leave the words 'last' out, or 'final,' or anything like that. I think that's probably better than making a last statement, or final word. I just try to keep that out of it."

The condemned inmates arrive in Huntsville from death row, at a prison about 45 miles to the east, early in the afternoon on the day of an execution. The punishments generally occur just past 6 p.m. O'Reilly would meet with inmates when they arrived to explain what would happen. "What I want to do is talk to him and figure out his demeanor," he said... "I tell them I want to afford them all the dignity they allow us to. I tell them I'm going to come back at 6 o'clock and tell them: 'It's time.'" Few condemned inmates balked when the "time" arrived, O'Reilly said. "We've had some tell us: 'I'm not going to fight, but I'm not going to walk,'" he said. "We picked them up and carried them. Ninety-nine percent of them, they walked on their own." He told inmates they could say whatever they wanted in their last statement, but it must be in English — "That's all I understand," he said — and it can't be profane. If the obscenities start, so do the drugs...