In just 3 years as warden of this city's namesake prison, Jim Willett set a remarkable record even by Texas standards. He dreaded every one of them. When the death penalty is debated, little is said about people like Willett who are asked to carry out the court's order.
Attention is focused on the family of a murder victim or the condemned.
But Willett and the other Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees who must administer the lethal drugs to a convicted killer are, in a way, victims themselves. Willett's is a story of the toll such requests take on a man. He came to the prison system to earn a decent living. He started as a correctional officer at the Huntsville Unit, and by the time he graduated from college, he had made sergeant. He leaped the rungs of the ladder, from prison to prison, from lieutenant to captain to major.