FIRST ON FOX: A pro-Trump former Florida prison warden who oversaw executions is urging President Biden to commute all federal and military death sentences before leaving office.
“I voted for President Trump in all of his campaigns, and I agree with him on most of his positions, but not the death penalty,” Ron McAndrew, former warden of the Florida State Penitentiary, wrote in a letter to the outgoing president. “I have written to President Trump personally to ask him to stop calling for more executions.”
McAndrew, a self-described “law-and-order guy,” Air Force veteran and pro-life Catholic, said that after overseeing three electric chair executions and witnessing five lethal injections, he grew to oppose the death penalty.
While he had reservations from the start, he told Fox News Digital that he saw a burst of flames from the head of Pedro Medina during his execution in 1997 on the electric chair. That incident became a watershed moment in Florida and other parts of the country that marked the beginning of the end of electrocution.
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Ron McAndrew, a former Florida prison warden, testifies during a 2019 hearing regarding a death row inmate. (Doug Engle/Ocala Star-Banner)
“A plume of smoke and then a flame that came down underneath the helmet and out right in front of my face, had it come a few inches further, it would have actually burned me,” he said.
Later, he said the stench was so overpowering that, “it was like we had gone to a human barbecue.”
State investigators found that Medina, a convicted murderer and Cuban refugee, had died instantly – but the incident traumatized McAndrew and at least two dozen other witnesses, he said.
The incident led Florida to adopt lethal injections instead, but he said that form of execution was no less disturbing for the prison workers who carried it out.
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Pedro Medina, a convicted killer, was sentenced to death and went to the electric chair on March 25, 1997. He was one of the last inmates electrocuted in this manner after his head burst into flames, filling the chamber with smoke and horrifying onlookers. (Archive PL / Alamy Stock Photo)
“The heaving of the chest is an example,” he told Fox News Digital. “You can see it if you’re up close, and you’re the executioner or a member of the team. You can see that they’re trying to break out of their own body, so to speak. But the witnesses don’t see this. They see it as, like, a clean, a sanitary form of killing someone.”
At one point, he said, he began seeing executed inmates in his sleep and drinking heavily – half a bottle of Johnnie Walker a night – as a result. Eventually, he was diagnosed with severe stress. Now he is a staunch supporter of abolishing the death penalty.
Read the letter here:
“I feel compelled to say there is one thing in particular that I agree about with President Biden,” McAndrew wrote in his letter. “We share a strong opposition to the death penalty. President Biden has the power to show mercy through the process of executive clemency, and I urge that he do so expeditiously for everyone on the federal and military death rows.”
When asked why the worst of the worst killers on death row, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Pittsburgh synagogue gunman Robert Bowers, should have their lives spared, he questioned where we should draw the line and suggested incarcerating them all with no possibility of parole instead.
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“If this same inmate was doing life without possibility of parole, he’d be working between 40 and 60 hours per week whether he liked it or not,” he said. “He would be making a contribution…rather than being a burden on the taxpayers, sitting in a cell getting room service for 25 years.”
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Abraham Bonowitz, who co-founded the group Death Penalty Action with McAndrew, told Fox News Digital that capital punishment should not be a partisan issue.
“Capital punishment is government overreach at its worst,” he said. “Anyone who does not trust the government to tax us fairly or come up with a safe vaccine should have a hard time trusting government with the power to execute its citizens.”
He also extended the appeal to Elon Musk, the future co-head of a new Department of Government Efficiency, if Biden rejects the letter.
President Biden, not pictured, meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
“We’re excited to have a cabinet level official focused on government efficiency, because this is the first time anyone in the federal government is positioned to eliminate the death penalty by executive order,” Bonowitz said. “There is no current government program more wasteful, ineffective and inefficient than capital punishment.”
The letter comes as Trump has vowed to not only end Biden’s moratorium on capital punishment, but also to expand the list of crimes that can be punishable with execution to include child rape, human trafficking and the murder of U.S. citizens by illegal immigrants.
There are currently 40 inmates on federal death row, and they include domestic terrorists, drug kingpins and criminals who had witnesses against them killed.
Tsarnaev, who killed four and wounded hundreds; Roof, who killed nine at a Bible study; Bowers, who killed 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue; and Kaboni Savage, a Philadelphia drug lord who killed 12 people – including four children linked to an informant – would all see clemency under the proposal.
President Biden listens as Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani speaks in the Oval Office of the White House on April 15, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The U.S. government has executed 50 inmates since 1927, according to the Bureau of Prisons, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Cold War spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. That is far fewer than the individual states, which have executed more than 1,500 condemned inmates in the last 50 years.
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McAndrew also took issue with the special treatment death row inmates receive. Unlike other prisoners, they do not have to work a job behind bars and contribute, in some way, to their own “upkeep.” They have a TV, a private cell and are kept separate from the general population.
In places like California, where death row inmates are safe from execution due to a moratorium against capital punishment, they also have access to elite attorneys and all the time in the world to try and fight their circumstances.
The feds carried out death sentences for 13 federal prisoners during Trump’s first term, the most under any president in a century. Biden declared a moratorium on federal executions after taking office in 2021.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
