'I executed 62 people like Christa Pike - I remember all of them and lethal injection was the worst of all'

'I executed 62 people like Christa Pike - I remember all of them and lethal injection was the worst of all' As Christa Pike survives a botched lethal injection and Jamaal Howard is executed using the same drug, a chilling interview with former executioner Jerry Givens reveals the horrors of America’s death chambers and how the 62 people he killed haunted him for the rest of his life The straps were fastened, the needles inserted, and the executioners waited for Christa Pike to die. But as the minutes dragged on inside a Tennessee death chamber, the condemned murderer kept breathing. She would eventually leave alive, her body ravaged by the drugs meant to kill her. Seven days later, hundreds of miles away in Texas, Jamaal Howard was strapped to another gurney and given the very same chemical. This time, the state got the death it had ordered. Hanging over both grim scenes are the disturbing words of a man who spent 17 years killing prisoners for America, only to discover that the 62 lives he'd taken would haunt him for the rest of his days. In an extraordinary interview, executioner Jerry Givens told me what really happens inside the death chamber, why lethal injection troubled him more than the electric chair, and how he predicted his job in death would torment him after his own demise. Last week, Pike survived two doses of lethal injection drugs and now lies shackled to a hospital bed, her arms badly injured and her body ravaged by the chemicals meant to kill her. On Wednesday, Jamaal Howard was strapped to a gurney in Texas, injected with the very same drug and pronounced dead. Overnight, the Pentagon announced it was to carry out the execution of convicted mass murderer, former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, on December 3, saying they would live-stream his firing squad death. The executions have exposed the harrowing truth of America's death chambers and revived the warnings of a man who knew their horrors better than anyone who ever lived. Jerry Givens killed 62 men for the state of Virginia. He remembered every single one of them. Their faces, their final prayers, the terror in their eyes and the terrible moment he sent thousands of volts rushing through their bodies or pumped deadly chemicals into their veins. For 17 years, he was one of America's chief executioners, responsible for preparing condemned prisoners for death before carrying out the final punishment. He watched men die in the electric chair, witnessed flesh catch fire and administered lethal injections that would eventually leave him questioning everything he once believed about capital punishment. And the memories never left him. Long after he walked away from the death chamber, the ghosts of those 62 prisoners continued to haunt him. Their deaths had become such a permanent part of his life that he feared he would carry their burden to his own grave. When I interviewed Givens in 2017, he spoke with extraordinary candour about the psychological toll of his work, the terrible responsibility of deciding when another human being should die and his growing conviction that America's execution system was dangerously flawed. His warnings now seem horribly prophetic. In Tennessee, convicted murderer Pike, 50, has regained consciousness after surviving a botched execution on September 30, when prison officials administered two doses of pentobarbital without killing her. Sentenced to death for the brutal torture and murder of 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995, Pike remains seriously ill with pneumonia, severe injuries to her arms and an uncertain prognosis. In Texas, Howard, 46, was executed using the same powerful drug, despite his lawyers raising concerns about the disastrous events in Tennessee. Convicted of murdering 42-year-old convenience store clerk Vickie Swartout during a robbery in 2000, Howard apologised to her family before receiving the fatal injection at Huntsville prison. He was pronounced dead at 8.03pm, becoming the 30th person executed in America this year. His lawyers had unsuccessfully argued that the failed attempt to kill Pike exposed the dangers associated with pentobarbital, while separately maintaining that Howard had an intellectual disability that made his execution unconstitutional. For Givens, who had personally administered lethal injections and operated the electric chair, these were precisely the sorts of horrors he had spent his later years warning America about. And when we spoke, he had an extraordinary message for those who believed lethal injection offered prisoners a peaceful, painless death. “They're playing Russian roulette with these guys' lives,” said Givens, who rose to become a captain in Virginia’s Department of Corrections. “You can pull the wool over the eyes of the public, but not someone who has been through it. They cannot fool me. The drug itself does not change. It hasn’t been successful on the human body. It is not designed for that. There is no drug for execution. How can it be tested? The expiration date should not be the reason why they are doing this. Get more of the drugs. Do it properly rather than move people’s dates up. They are using it as an excuse. But I can’t care who it is; it should not be happening.” At the time we spoke, Arkansas was preparing what campaigners described as a conveyor belt of executions, attempting to put eight prisoners to death in just 11 days before its supply of midazolam, a sedative used in its three-drug lethal injection cocktail, expired. The extraordinary rush to kill prisoners before the drugs passed their expiry date appalled Givens, who had overseen 62 executions in Virginia between 1982 and 1999, including 37 by electric chair and 25 by lethal injection. But despite the horrifying injuries electrocution could inflict, he was in no doubt which method was worse for the man carrying out the killing. “As an executioner, by far the most difficult, the one that takes the greatest toll, is lethal injection,” said Givens. “The electric chair is a machine that will run automatically. If something went wrong, like a body catching fire, I could push a button and stop it. One time a body did set on fire when his trouser leg went up in flames after he leant against the electrode. After that, we cut the pants leg off above the knee, so we didn't have to worry about that. The difference is that the current is doing everything. You have about 2,500 volts and four amps going through the body for a 45-second cycle. "That is enough to kill a cow or a horse.” He explained how lethal injection brought the executioner far closer to the condemned man, making the experience considerably more personal and psychologically disturbing. He added: “But when it comes to lethal injection, you have tubes of chemicals going through and an IV line connected to the arm of the condemned. They are clear so you can see the fluid going into the body. So if there is a blockage, you are going to see blood coming back into your tubing. That indicates that something is wrong. It makes you feel more attached as you have to push the chemical in. There is a machine you hook them up to, but you are still more attached to the process. “It's a little longer, too. It's much harder on an executioner as you feel more attached. With electrocution, once you push the button, that is it. Your hands are free. With lethal injection, as you are injecting this stuff, you are actually killing the man.” It is a description that has taken on terrible significance following the execution attempt involving Pike, whose lawyers say drugs intended to enter her bloodstream instead leaked into surrounding tissue, leaving her arms burned and blistered. Givens also warned that the procedures were far more complicated than many people imagined, particularly when carried out by prison officers without the medical training normally associated with administering powerful drugs. “If you don’t clear your line, and the chemicals mix, it can cause a hard gel to form inside and clog your line," he explained. “You have to clean the line. It takes a lot to do. You have to make sure you are doing things right. I just didn’t like using drugs to kill. The whole use of drugs is a mixed message. They are supposed to save lives.” Yet Givens had once been a passionate supporter of capital punishment, his conviction forged during a terrifying experience as a teenager growing up in Richmond, Virginia. Attending a house party in the city's housing projects, he spotted a girl he liked but was nervous about asking her to dance. As he finally plucked up the courage to approach her, a gunman burst into the apartment demanding to know the whereabouts of somebody called Larry. The gunman opened fire, and the girl collapsed. “There was only one way in and one way out, and everyone was screaming as the gun went off,” recalled the grandfather-of-five. “In the melee, I thought the girl had tripped, but when I picked her up, she had been shot in the head. If I had stood to the left of her, I would have been shot myself. I would have taken the bullet. It was at the moment I believed in the death penalty as it takes a coward to kill someone for no apparent reason.” Givens joined the prison service in 1974 and was later recruited to work on death row as America resumed executions following the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. His first execution - of which he was part of the team - was that of Frank Coppola, a former police officer convicted of murder, who died in Virginia's electric chair on August 10, 1982. “His lawyers told him to carry on fighting, but he said no. He said he wanted to go," he said. “He’d been convicted of murder. But by him volunteering, it suddenly relieved us all from a lot of the tension, but he was the first I’d seen.” When the chief executioner subsequently stepped down, Givens took over. Among the first men he personally put to death was Linwood Briley, one of three brothers responsible for a notorious string of murders in Virginia. In the weeks before his execution on October 12, 1984, Briley asked to be baptised, a ceremony Givens attended. “I then prayed with him before his execution. I prayed with all of them before their execution," he said. "My routine was trying to prepare the men for their next phase, to make sure they were ready. That is the key. To make sure they are ready to die. You don’t want them to put up a struggle or fight as they are placed in the chair. We were trained for that. We would talk to them, cater to them. You have to realise this is their last everything. This is their last chance to be forgiven, to be here on earth. It is an experience that only those who have been there can explain.” There was an almost ritualistic routine to each execution. Before a prisoner was strapped into the electric chair, Givens would personally shave his head and leg, where the electrodes would be attached. Nine prison officers were involved in preparing the condemned man, while a preacher offered final prayers. “Before an execution, I would shave his head and his right leg as that is where the electrodes would be fitted," added Givens “We had sort of an electric band that would fit around his leg, and that cable would go from his leg to the machine. And then one to his head.” When the execution began, Givens would take his position behind a curtain, where he could still see the prisoner's back and head but was shielded from the witnesses watching his face. The warden would read the death warrant and a signal would be given to begin. For years, he managed to cope with the psychological consequences by convincing himself that the responsibility belonged entirely to the condemned prisoner. He added: “I had to force myself to shift all the blame off myself. You shift all the blame onto the condemned person who went out and committed a crime he didn’t have to do. There was a lot of stuff he did before coming to me. This was the last resort. You had to do a lot of things before you got this far. What made you do these things? These men's deaths will haunt me long after I have gone.” But gradually his certainty started to weaken, replaced by a terrible fear that he might one day kill an innocent man. In 1999, Givens was himself convicted of offences including perjury and spent four years behind bars. The experience transformed his understanding of the criminal justice system and the possibility that innocent people could find themselves condemned by it. For a man who had spent almost two decades carrying out death sentences, it was a profound and deeply uncomfortable revelation. He understood better than most that once an execution was completed, there could be no successful appeal, no retrial and no opportunity to correct a dreadful miscarriage of justice. “While I was before a grand jury, I was supposed to be carrying out executions. I was concentrating on what I had to do, not on what I was saying before the jury,” he recalled. You have to be that focused. It's not just about flicking a switch. You have to be so mentally prepared. In the court, I just blurted out anything to these people. Until I read the transcript, I hadn’t a clue what I said. They had me for perjury, giving a false statement; my mind was never on trial. They convicted me as I was the chief executioner, but thank God it gave me a way out of the killings. It was a blessing in the end.” Givens subsequently became an outspoken campaigner against capital punishment, arguing that even the most serious offenders should spend the rest of their lives in prison rather than be executed. He said: “No matter what crime these men have committed, they should be sentenced to death in prison. If we must keep the death penalty, allow the inmate to give his life. The only way they should die is if they want to give their life for the crimes they have committed. There are men on death row who will take that option. I know, I put such men to death.” Yet walking away from the death chamber could never free Givens from the extraordinary burden of what he had done. He believed the experiences would remain with him until his dying day. He feared that the terrible memories would never truly release their grip, even as he contemplated his own passing. He also issued a stark warning to anyone tempted to regard the executioner's job as an ordinary occupation. “If you volunteer to be an executioner and you enjoy doing it, then you are in it for the wrong reasons. You need to see a psychiatrist,” he said. “You need to be checked because these things are going to affect you as they did me.” Givens died in April 2020, aged 67, after contracting Covid-19, having spent his final years campaigning to abolish the punishment he had once administered. Six years later, the harrowing ordeal of Pike and the execution of Howard have brought fresh scrutiny to a system he spent so long exposing. In Tennessee, officials are investigating how a woman could survive two doses of a drug intended to kill her within minutes. In Texas, another man's execution has gone ahead despite the questions raised by what happened to Pike. And perhaps the most haunting part of my conversation with Givens was the knowledge that here was a man who had spent almost two decades ending human lives in the name of justice, only to discover that the consequences of those deaths could never be left behind. He had witnessed burning flesh, failing equipment and the terrible intimacy of injecting lethal chemicals into another human being. He remembered the faces, the prayers and the final moments of all 62 prisoners. In the end, Jerry Givens escaped the execution chamber, but he never escaped the men who died there. And even though his own life has now ended, the ghosts of those executions remain, along with the warnings of the man who knew better than almost anyone what it really meant to kill for the state.