On the face of it, Don Cabana is your typical fifty-something American. Tanned and overweight, he did two tours in Vietnam and after retiring from his government service job took up lecturing. What makes him stand out is that in his career as a prison officer, rising to the rank of warden, he witnessed, aided or performed, six executions.
Now giving public lectures - including a recent tour of Irish universities - Cabana speaks of the experiences which totally changed his life and led him to become a passionate and vociferous campaigner against the death penalty. The reason for his visit to Ireland is that he believes international pressure has a key role in ending the death penalty.
"America responds and respects people of other views; you can bring the power of moral persuasion to bear on public officials," he says.
After Vietnam where, with no embarrassment or shame, he says "killing came as second nature", Cabana became a prison guard. The first prisoner he spoke to was Albert de Salvo, the Boston Strangler, and he found him polite and engaging. From that first night on - "the bug just bit me", he says - he was captivated by correctional work and "the belief that all humans are essentially good".
Cabana progressed rapidly through the ranks to become deputy governor of a prison in Florida by 1977. Until then he had never given any serious consideration to performing an execution. That year, however, executions were reintroduced and he and his governor found themselves having to organise the first one for 20 years.
"Every so often people will ask me how many executions I have taken part in, they will say `six doesn't sound that many', I just say `try one; one is heart-stopping'." "I was killing a human being; did I forget the victim as I walked John Spinklink to the electric chair? No, my heart ached for them but it also ached for John Spinklink's family. There are so many victims in this process." He has no illusions about the calibre of people on Death Row. "I had a serial killer who was wanted in five other states. I had a man who got angry driving the car because his baby wouldn't stop crying and bounced the child off the pavement." He moved to Mississippi's legendary Parchman prison as warden. There the gas chamber awaited "the kind of Death Row inmate everyone loves to hate" - Jimmy Lee Grey, convicted of the rape and murder of a three-year-old.
"The gas chamber is considerably more violent than the electric chair. It takes longer. As much as 15 minutes may elapse before you can say that the inmate has died, and it is considerably more painful." Jimmy Lee was securely strapped in the chamber, apart from his head as the body goes through violent seizures from the cyanide gas." As the gas took effect, Grey's head began banging off a pole behind him. "I don't know of a way even after 25 years to describe how violently, it was so hard the walls were literally vibrating. The doctors pronounced him dead even though his head was still banging. It looked terrible."
Does focusing on gruesome detail not detract from the even more important fact that human life is being taken by the state? "No, those details underscore the fact that you taking a human life. To advocates of the death penalty they aren't even real people," Cabana says. The innocent on Death Row may seem a staple of Hollywood but Cabana had his own experience of this also. There were serious questions around the case against Edward Earl Johnson, convicted almost entirely on the basis of a confession he later retracted. For Cabana these were secondary compared to the condemned man's own actions. "Usually a condemned man gives some indication of his guilt such as by saying `tell my mom I'm sorry' or `apologise to the victims' family for me'." Not Johnson; he maintained his innocence to the very end. "He said `Warden, in the next few minutes, you are about to become a murderer'." Believing that Johnson was trying to act tough, and knowing he was religious, Cabana asked him to make peace with his God. "Edward Johnson looked at me and said, `Warden, I'm at peace with my God; how are you going to be with yours?' " Cabana says that question has never left him.
A few years ago, a former Mississippi state governor came visiting Cabana. "He told me `I think it's only fair to tell you that I have had information come into my possession that makes me believe we executed an innocent young man'."
Two days after Johnson's execution, the horror of the death penalty finally shattered Cabana when he had to put to death Connie Ray Evans. Convicted of having killed a shop clerk while robbing a store, Evans nonetheless "came to be like another of my six kids", Cabana says. His eyes fill with tears as he tells the story of the friendship developing over years of conversation and games of draughts, and Cabana describes how when the moment finally came for Evans to die he told him to take a few breaths and that it would all be over. Instead, Evans tried to fight the fumes and died a violent death. Cabana found all control leaving him and says he pounded the glass "screaming `dear God let him die'".
After Evans's execution, Cabana transferred out of Parchman and soon after retired from the prison service. With more than a hint of defensiveness and guilt, he says of his role in executions: "God's plan was for me to be there to bring some sense of compassion, humanity and dignity to a cold unfeeling process." He believes all those involved in executions feel the same way. When the time came to bring Evans to be killed, he says: "There was not a dry eye among any of the guards; those on other shifts even came in to bid farewell to him."
God's plan now seems to be for him to do what he can to stop executions. "What is wrong with the death penalty? . . . It is morally wrong. How do you teach killers that killing is wrong by killing them?" he asks.
