First appearance on Fox: A pro-Trump former Florida prison warden who oversaw executions is calling on President Biden to commute all federal and military death sentences before he leaves office.
“While I have voted for President Trump in every campaign and agree with most of his positions, I do not agree with him on the death penalty,” former Florida prison warden Ron McAndrew wrote in a letter to the outgoing president. I do not agree.” “I have personally written to President Trump asking him to stop calling for more executions.”
McAndrew, a self-described “law and order man,” Air Force veteran, and pro-life Catholic, became a vocal opponent of the death penalty after overseeing three electric chair executions and witnessing five lethal injections. He said it became.
Despite his initial hesitation, he told Fox News Digital that he saw flames coming out of Pedro Medina's head during his 1997 electric chair execution. The incident marked a watershed moment that marked the beginning of the end for electrocution in Florida and elsewhere.
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Former Florida prison warden Ron McAndrew testified at a 2019 hearing on death row inmates. (Doug Engle/Ocala Star Banner)
“Smoke rose, and then the flames came down from under my helmet right in front of my face. If I had been a few inches away, I would have actually been burned,” he said.
He later said the stench was so strong that it was “like going to a human barbecue.”
State investigators found that Medina, a convicted murderer and Cuban refugee, died instantly, but he said the incident traumatized McAndrew and at least 20 other witnesses.
The incident prompted Florida to use lethal injection instead, a form of execution that was equally disturbing to the prison staff who carried out the execution, he said.
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Convicted murderer Pedro Medina was sentenced to death and sentenced to the electric chair on March 25, 1997. He was one of the last prisoners to be electrocuted in this manner after his head caught fire, filling the room with smoke and frightening onlookers. (Archive PL/Alamy Stock Photo)
“Heartbeat is one example of that,” he told Fox News Digital. “If you look up close, if you're the executioner or a member of the team, you can see it. You can see them trying to get out of their body, so to speak. But the eyewitnesses… They think this is a clean, hygienic way of killing people. ”
At some point, he said, he started seeing executed inmates drinking heavily in their sleep, resulting in them drinking half a bottle of Johnnie Walker a night. Eventually, he was diagnosed as having severe stress. He is now an ardent supporter of abolishing the death penalty.
please read the letter here:
“I feel compelled to say that there is one thing in particular that I agree with President Biden,” McAndrew wrote in the letter. “We share a strong opposition to the death penalty. President Biden has the authority to show mercy through the executive clemency process, and we urge him to quickly show mercy to all federal and military death row inmates. ”
When asked why some of the worst murderers on death row, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers, should be spared their lives, He questioned where the line should be drawn and suggested putting them behind bars. Instead, there is no possibility of parole at all.
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“If these same inmates were living without the possibility of parole, they would be working 40 to 60 hours a week, whether they like it or not,” he said. “He will be contributing instead of sitting in a cell receiving room service for 25 years and becoming a burden to taxpayers.”
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Abraham Bonowitz, who co-founded the group Death Penalty Action with McAndrew, told Fox News Digital that the death penalty should not be a partisan issue.
“The death penalty is government overreach at its worst,” he said. “If we don't trust our government to tax us fairly or develop safe vaccines, we should have a hard time trusting a government with the power to execute its citizens.”
He also extended his appeal to Elon Musk, who will become the co-director of the new Office of Government Efficiency if Biden rejects the letter.
President Biden (not pictured) speaks with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday, November 13, 2024 in Washington, DC. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
“I'm excited to have a Cabinet-level official who is committed to government efficiency because this is the first time a federal official has been in a position to abolish the death penalty by executive order,” Bonowitz said. said. “Nothing in our current government program is more wasteful, ineffective, and inefficient than the death penalty.”
The letter comes as President Trump vows not only to end Biden's stay of execution, but also to expand the list of crimes eligible for the death penalty, including child rape, human trafficking, and killing of U.S. citizens by illegal immigrants. It was done.
There are currently 40 people on federal death row, including domestic terrorists, drug lords, and criminals whose witnesses have been murdered.
Tsarnaev killed four people and injured hundreds. Roof killed nine people at a Bible study. Bowers killed 11 people at Tree of Life Synagogue. And Kaboni Savage, the Philadelphia drug lord who murdered 12 people, including four children who had ties to informants, would all receive leniency under the proposal.
President Biden listens to a speech by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani in the Oval Office of the White House on April 15, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The U.S. government has executed 50 inmates since 1927, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Cold War spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, according to the Bureau of Prisons. This is far fewer than each state that has executed more than 1,500 death row inmates over the past 50 years.
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Mr. McAndrew also objected to the special treatment given to death row inmates. Unlike other prisoners, they do not have to work inside the prison and contribute in any way to their “maintenance of life”. They have televisions and private cells and are isolated from the general population.
In places like California, where death row inmates are spared execution through moratoriums on the death penalty, they have access to elite lawyers and can fight their situation anywhere in the world at any time.
During President Trump's first term, federal authorities executed 13 federal prisoners, the most under any president in the past 100 years. After taking office in 2021, Biden declared a moratorium on federal executions.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
