The Warden’s Tale

The Warden’s Tale

I have been Warden for eighteen years. The last three years of my employment have been the Warden at the United States Correctional Facility for Women at Femdea, California.

Femdea is renowned as the largest women’s prison in the country, and also because it is the site of the only capital punishment facility for women in the Federal system. The prison contains the only gallows designed specifically for the multiple execution of female offenders. These executions are almost entirely for drug offenses under the Substance Control Act of 2010, although occasionally women are also executed for other crimes such as murder on Federal property, terrorist-related offenses, etc. I had always personally delighted in taking the responsibility of Warden and in charge of organizing and supervising executions under what is known as the Anti Narc Protocol.

The ANP was first brought into use in mid-2012, when it became obvious that the normal method of death by lethal injection was inadequate, too time-consuming and too expensive to carry out between ten and twenty executions every week. The large number of executions was due to the Substance Control Act, which essentially provides the death penalty for any sale of prohibited narcotics except for marijuana, and also for the possession of fairly small amounts of drugs for any use, sale or personal. America finally decided to get serious about putting an end to drugs, and unlike any other capital punishment law in American history, the statute has been vigorously and speedily enforced. In the first few years there were at least a thousand executions at Femdea annually. Even though the drug scourge has now been largely eliminated in the United States, there will always remain a small number of people who simply don’t get the message, including women.

Female executions are now down to between three and four hundred per year, and are expected to remain at that level for some time. In my own time at Femdea, the fewest number of women I ever saw hanged on one day was three, the largest number ten. The usual number of hangings on execution days nowadays is normally between five and eight women. With the ANP, this number is manageable.

The legal appeals process takes about a year. Pardons and commutations are rare, although they do occur. When the prison warden is served notice that a death row inmate’s appeal has been rejected, she is scheduled for execution on morning a month from the day, unless that day falls on Christmas Day, the Fourth of July, or for some ironic reason, Valentine’s Day. (Who says prison administrators have no sense of humor?) The prisoner is brought to my office and informed that her appeal has been denied and her sentence will be duly carried out in one month time, that there is no further hope for legal intervention and she must compose herself for death. This where the crying and screaming usually occur, and there are trained psychological counselors available for the condemned woman. They’re good at their jobs, and this is why we have so few instances of women struggling or fighting when they are taken to the gallows. The prisoner is then removed to a holding cell on a long row of cells which runs parallel with the gallows platform.

I need to describe the gallows itself. It is almost like a stage in an auditorium, a raised platform approximately forty feet long and twelve feet wide, supported by concrete pillars. The first year it was erected the warden of the time tried individual trap doors, but there were too many mechanical problems and delays, so Femdea switched to an older and simpler stepping-off system. In front of the platform are rows of folding chairs for witnesses. A single steel beam or girder with each end mounted in the concrete walls of the death house runs over the platform at a height of about fifteen feet. The girder is also supported by two concrete pillars near either end, and is further held up by steel suspension cables bolted into the roof. At intervals, heavy-duty steel U-bolts are bolted into the bottom of the beam, and the noosed ropes are attached to these bolts, threaded in manually by the set-up crew on execution morning. The beam is not exactly flush with the edge of the gallows platform. There is about three feet of clearance between the beam and the edge, so that when a condemned woman is suspended, she dangles in the air in front of the platform.

The floor of the platform is covered in industrial carpet, except for rubber matting which runs from the ten step-off blocks, or tabourets to give them their ancient and correct name, to the door of each holding cell. The rubber matting is laid down because sometimes the condemned women actually urinate in terror at the sight of the waiting noose. (We keep a mop and bucket handy.) There is a peep hole on the door of each cell, but these remain shut until the prisoner is taken out to be hanged. The blocks are just that, large steel squares or pillars with a set of five steps leading up to them, with a carpeted top. The ropes are of seasoned manila hemp. The noose is of the British style with a heavy plastic D-ring instead of the usual American-style noose with the hangman’s knot. To be honest, this version won out because the execution team found it too much trouble and too time-consuming to tie the many nooses needed for multiple executions. One noose dangles in front of each block. The actual execution crew who carry out the hangings are all male corrections officers; female corrections officers are with each condemned woman in each holding cell, two per cell.

At eight thirty on the morning of the execution, I enter the death house by the inside door (not from the gallows side) and goes from cell to cell along the inner corridor, reading each condemned woman her death warrant and asking if she has any last words to say, which are recorded by a stenographer. This is so the actual execution will go swiftly and efficiently. At eight forty-five, the official witnesses (no media) are allowed in. They are paid $50 per execution plus travel expenses and some of them turn up at hanging after hanging. At nine o’clock sharp, once all the nooses have been rigged, the warden comes out onto the gallows platform to observe, and I will give the signal to begin.

The holding cells are numbered on the gallows side, one through ten. I slides back the peep hole slot on cell number one. One of the female guards on the inside unlocks the door and admits the Warden and two male guards from the execution team, thus making for a somewhat crowded cell. When the peephole slides open, the second female guard requests that the prisoner stand up. She is wearing a white hospital examination gown with only a single string tie at the back. When the execution team enters, the female guard requests that the prisoner turn around and face the wall. Ideally, from then on until the prisoner is dead, there is no more speech of any kind, although in practice sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. The female guard then unties the hospital gown and lets it fall to the floor. (Prisoners are executed in the nude supposedly because the added humiliation is to be part of their punishment, but frankly I have always thought it was so the mortuary team wouldn’t have to undress them and pull off dresses and underwear soaked with feces and urine.) The female guard draws the condemned woman’s wrists together behind her back, and one of the male guards handcuffs her.

She is then led out the door, a few brief steps along the rubber mat, up the steps and onto the block, which is large enough for three people to stand on the top. She has a male guard on either side of her, holding her arms. The guard on her right reaches out with one hand and secures the noose. While the guard on the left holds both arms and steadies the prisoner, the one on the right slips the noose around her neck and cinches it under her jaw just below the right ear. He nods to the guard on the left. Each guard keeps one hand on the prisoner’s elbow, place their other hands on the prisoner’s upper back and lower back respectively, and without any word or further delay they “assist” her, as the official terminology says, off the block. They don’t actually push unless the prisoner is struggling. If the prisoner is quiet and resigned, as most are, they gently but insistently move her forward until she steps off the block.

The condemned woman drops two to three feet and is suspended. The rope tightens and bites into her neck, there is a kind of “huuh!” from her as if she had received a sudden blow, her head is tilted forcibly upward and to the left at an angle, and then for anywhere from sixty seconds to fifteen minutes or more, she does the Dance of Death, which is always fascinating to watch. Every Dance is slightly different, as unique as a snowflake. Occasionally the prisoner’s neck is broken, but the idea that a broken neck causes instantaneous death on the gallows is a myth. You can tell the neck is broken because there are no major convulsions, but there is severe twitching and palpitating in the body and the hanging woman’s head rolls back and forth, sometimes blood coming from her mouth as she bites her tongue. I have seen this go on for six or seven minutes before death occurs.

Usually, however, the drop does not break the neck, and death is by strangulation. After the drop the condemned woman usually kicks wildly on air for several minutes, which of course has the effect of making her swing freely like a pendulum, back and forth, the rope creaking. With the swinging of her body and the heaving of her chest as she tries to draw breath, her breasts jiggle and bounce enticingly. She writhes and twirls at the end of the rope, bobbing and gasping, eyes goggling in her head. Most hanged women attempt to do the “bunny hop,” trying to jump or draw themselves upward to take a little of the pressure off the noose and perhaps draw a gasp or two of air, and occasionally they succeed, although the resulting slight downward drop cinches the noose still tighter around their necks. Very occasionally a hanged woman is able to twist herself around and actually get her toes or feet back up on the block for a few seconds. In that case the guards, who have by now come down from the block and are standing on either side of it in order to prevent that very thing, push her feet off and set her swinging again.

Generally speaking, although not always, the first wild convulsions and kicking dies down after a few minutes, and then comes the awful stretching, as the hanged woman’s toes seem to stretch down and her body arches, as she seeks some kind of floor beneath her to ease the agony of the rope. The swinging subsides somewhat and now she begins to turn more than swing, first to the right and then to the left. One of the most gripping of all experiences is to look into the eyes of a hanged woman who has reached this phase, because you can tell that she is entirely conscious still, suffering beyond imagination, that she knows perfectly well where she is and what is happening to her. Sometimes the prisoner makes small, odd gasping noises, although not always.

After the stretching and turning comes the twitching or spasmodic phase, as the body itself begins to die. This is usually marked by the fluttering of the toes, quivering of the breasts, and jerking of the handcuffed wrists behind her back, and often her tongue lolls out of her head, a bright cyanosed blue almost like something out of a cartoon. The official finish is considered to be when bowels and bladder relax in death and a stream of feces and urine is released into a tile trough with drains that runs beneath the gallows. A guard with a hose quickly washes the excrement down the drain and standing on a stool and wearing latex gloves, he cleans the dangling body with an alcohol and disinfectant-soaked wash cloth. At this point death is presumed to have occurred, but in my experience it’s generally about thirty seconds after she shits. You can see the light go out in their eyes, like turning off a lamp.

Now, as fascinating as it is watching a naked woman do the Dance of Death, while all of this is going on the guards are not just standing there observing. There are other women who must join their erring sister on the gallows. Once the actual physical struggle of the first executed woman has subsided and she has reached the turning as opposed to swinging stage, I go to cell number two and opens the peephole, the second condemned prisoner is stripped and cuffed and led out onto the platform and up onto the block, and the entire process is repeated. After she has somewhat calmed down on her rope comes cell number three’s turn, and so forth until all of Friday’s batch of condemned women are hanging in the air.