He executed death row prisoners. Then they came back to haunt him

Every night, one of the men Ron McAndrew killed would sit at the foot of his bed and stare, blankly, into his tortured soul.

He knew they were coming. He’d shift over in his sheets to make room. “They never said anything,” McAndrew recalls, his aged voice straining from the weight of the memory. “They just sat there and looked at me.” But their eyes would talk.

They would ask: “How could you do such a thing?’” says McAndrew. “You always claimed to be a good person. And now you’re killing people.”

Nearly three decades have passed since McAndrew watched the life slip from the faces of eight convicted murderers, but each death lives with him. He recalls every part of the job’s terrible routine: Listening to the inmates’ final words. Arranging their last meal. And giving the silent signal to kill.

McAndrew was the warden at Florida State Prison, the facility where the state executes its death row inmates, until 1998. He led a team that killed three prisoners by electrocution, then went to Texas to assist in the lethal injections of several more men. He became convinced that one of his inmates was innocent; another execution was botched, setting fire to an inmate’s head.

And he regrets it all. “I really believed in the death penalty,” he says. “I can’t believe that I did, today. I simply cannot believe it.”

Now 88, McAndrew has become an unlikely opponent of capital punishment. He is trying, with whatever time he has left, to right eight wrongs. “I had to look at myself,” he says on a recent sticky Florida afternoon. “You really start thinking about what you’ve done. Why you did it,” he says.

But his own state is working against him. Since the start of 2025, Florida has executed more people than any other state and nearly as many as the rest of the country combined. On Tuesday, the state is slated to carry out its 16th execution of the year: of Curtis Beasley, 77, who was convicted for the 1995 bludgeoning death of a woman. His lawyers have argued Beasley has deteriorating cognitive abilities which make the death penalty unreasonable; Florida’s Supreme Court denied his appeal earlier this week.

The state’s flurry of executions agonizes McAndrew. He does not like the word “execution,” he explains, his soft intonation turning to fury. “I prefer to call it a premeditated ceremonial political killing. Because that’s what it is.”

This house stands at a crossroads. Directly below McAndrew’s home, an hour’s drive south of Gainesville, Florida’s Rainbow River merges with the Withlacoochee, a waterway that emerges from a swamp and dances through the center of the state. Ron’s wife, Lynne, says she once saw a man drown on those waters after his boat tangled with a sunken tree and capsized.

Tina Russell for CNN

Every day, indoors and out, McAndrew is shadowed by death. He thinks a little about his own passing, and he thinks a lot about the deaths he oversaw. Lawyers, advocacy groups and death row inmates compete for McAndrew’s time, hoping to gain insight from a former warden who turned against his state.

So he keeps reliving it all. As he talks in his living room, the clouds outside turn gradually darker, signaling an approaching storm. The air is heavy as he speaks. McAndrew has a mischievous sense of humor, but there is no laughter in his voice once his mind travels back to Florida State Prison.

McAndrew was an ambitious state corrections official when he became warden in 1996. It was a role with a solemn responsibility: All of Florida’s executions take place there. “I was so anxious to climb the ladder,” he says. Officers competed to join his execution squad, a high-profile team whose work was done at the behest of the governor.

And McAndrew, back then, was ready to do it. He recalls details of each execution with ease. The state gave him $40 to procure a final meal, he says: when more was needed, he would dip into his own pocket.

The night before he’d play coach, gathering his team for a pep talk. “Coffee and donuts are on me,” he’d tell them. “But it’s going to cost you, because I want to know how everybody in here is feeling.”

A gallows humor persisted among some officers, which McAndrew detested. The electric chair was nicknamed “Old Sparky,” a moniker McAndrews banned. “Nothing about what we’re doing is a joke,” he’d tell them. He ended one tradition – a post-execution team trip to a nearby diner – after locals high-fived members of his squad.

On each fateful morning, McAndrew would visit the inmate’s cell and nod to his guards for privacy. By this point, the prisoner’s life was measured in minutes. The door would shut with a metallic clunk; McAndrew would join the man on his bed and begin the final conversation they would ever have.

“It’s just me and you,” he told them. “Anything you want to say?”

He discovered the men had a lot on their minds. “I tried my very best to be a person of comfort.”

He promised each prisoner he’d never repeat what was discussed, and he’s stuck to that promise. But asked about their state of mind, McAndrew falls silent.

His eyes drift out through his living room window, past his deck to the swampy waters beyond, where gators skulk below the surface. Suddenly he’s back in 1997 — his words keep coming, but his face darkens.

“Tears,” he says at last. “Anxiousness. A fast tapping of feet. Surprise.”

Eventually, McAndrew would pull the handcuffed prisoners’ shoes off their feet — a final moment of intimacy before a clinical ritual.

Then he left them alone.

In Florida’s execution chamber, everyone knew their job. The first was to slam the prisoner into the chair. “By making it so brutal,” McAndrew explains, “it creates a shock within that person that actually calms them. For a bit.”

As the inmate reeled from the blow, the team strapped him to the chair. McAndrew’s responsibility was the right ankle. Eight years earlier, the serial murderer Ted Bundy was executed here. Guards still talked about the struggle he put up.

“They said he had the strength of a dozen men,” says McAndrew.

The rest of the routine would play out with grim efficiency. McAndrew would put a microphone before the inmate’s face and ask for their last words. Meanwhile, 26 witnesses – “judges, lawyers, citizens, curiosity seekers, bloodthirsty assholes,” he calls them – watched and scribbled notes.

A leather mask was fixed to the man’s face, “so tightly it automatically breaks the nose,” says McAndrew. Blood would run from underneath the mask every time, he recalls. “But they couldn’t scream.”

Then governor would call to tell McAndrew: “There are no stays, there are no stays.”

And then came a macabre performance. McAndrew would give a subtle, unnoticed signal to a man in black robes and a hood, hidden behind a partial wall. The man was the executioner, hired by McAndrew for $150 each time, his identity unknown even to prison staff. A secret language with one meaning. The signal meant “pull the lever.”

McAndrew talks softly these days, his words evaporating into the air from time to time. He used to take his boat out onto the waters, but today, his life is slow and deliberate. He spends a lot of time thinking about it all: weighing good and bad deeds like beads on an abacus.

He has lived many lives. The first began in North Carolina in 1938, where Depression and war shaped the contours of his childhood.

Sometimes, on the radio, news of an execution in Raleigh would reach his rural outpost. “It’s just like the Bible says,” his grandfather, a Methodist minister who raised McAndrew, would explain. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

“You take that on with you right into adulthood,” says McAndrew. “It’s a part of your personality. It doesn’t just leave you.”

It stayed with him during his next unlikely lives: two years in the Air Force; four marriages; a decade selling perfume overseas. In the 1970s, after losing his sales job, McAndrew heard from a friend that a prison in Florida was desperate for workers. He laughed: “You think I’d work in a prison?”

He eventually worked in several prisons. Officer McAndrew became Sergeant McAndrew, then Lieutenant McAndrew, then Major McAndrew. Eventually, he was asked to become warden at the State Prison near Starke, a town split in two by a railroad line and kept thriving by corrections officers.

But first, McAndrew was asked whether he would have any trouble sending prisoners to their death. “No, sir,’” he replied. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

Things soon changed. “I knew something was going on inside of me,” he says. He’d obsess about the prisoners’ lives, taking home case files. He became increasingly concerned about one condemned inmate, Leo Jones, convicted of the fatal shooting of a cop in Jacksonville. Jones maintained his innocence, and said his confession was coerced. “This investigation was piss poor,” says McAndrew.

He told his boss, whose response, says McAndrew, was: “Ron, stay the f**k out of those records. That’s not your job.” Jones was executed in 1998.

During that time, McAndrew barely slept. When he did, the visions appeared: the condemned prisoners, alive again in his mind, sat silently on his mattress.

As he talks, his hands, crumpled by the years, clutch the sides of his $7,000 motorized wheelchair. It brings him an eerie kinship with his Florida inmates: His body shifts and heaves as he describes their final movements, their futile efforts to reject the fatal shock.

By the time of his third execution, McAndrew was drinking heavily each night to numb the pain. He contemplated suicide. He gestures to his wife, Lynne: If it weren’t for her, he says, he would have followed through.

And then, in March 1997, a death row inmate named Pedro Medina was strapped into the chair.

“I am still innocent,” Medina exclaimed into the microphone. The inmate, convicted for a stabbing in Orlando, had always insisted he had not committed the crime. But those words – a frantic coda to Medina’s life – meant nothing now. The mask covered his face, and McAndrew gave the signal.

“There was a pop first,” he says. And then a huge flame erupted, McAndrew recalls. Suddenly Medina’s head was alight and the chamber filled with black smoke.

The electrician turned to McAndrew. “Continue?” he asked. “I couldn’t stop it at that point,” he says gravely. “I said, ‘Yes.’ Continue.” In a life full of regrets, McAndrew regrets that word most of all.

The smell of human flesh was putrid; it would never leave his clothes. McAndrew ordered his team to open the windows. The scent drifted outside and upwards, into a cell block. “All the other inmates on death row could smell Pedro Medina being burned to death,” he says.

An autopsy later found Medina died painlessly, but McAndrew rejects that finding in graphic terms. “Pieces of his head were falling off,” he says. “We literally burned him to death.”

That was the worst day of McAndrew’s life. For hours he paced his office while national news channels relayed the grim nature of the killing. He took frantic calls from his wife.

“The whole process is difficult to get out of your mind,” he says. He spent years trying, through alcohol, then therapy. But “at my age now, I don’t want it to get out,” he says. “I want to remember it.”

“Someone put me in this position on purpose because I needed to be here,” he says. “Never has there been a warden in the state of Florida that has traveled all over the world to speak against the death penalty.”

“If (anyone) stands in front of me long enough to hear my story, I’m going to tell it.”

McAndrew’s story didn’t end that day, but it took a different course. The Medina execution portended the end of electrocution in Florida. An angry governor loaned him to Texas on a fact-finding deployment, shadowing a novel method the state was using: lethal injection.

That method is now the default method of execution in most US states, including in Florida. It was adopted, its advocates say, because it is a more humane way to end a life. “It was not humane at all,” says McAndrew. He was a member of the Texas team that killed five men with the drug, he says. “If it was humane, they wouldn’t need eight belts to hold somebody down.”

By the time McAndrew retired in 2002, he was a broken man. He took a few months to wallow in his regrets.

“I wish I’d never gone to Florida State Prison,” he says. “I wish I’d never gotten into that dirty business.”

Then he got to work trying to undo all the bad he had done.

He has traveled across the US to speak against the death penalty and has spent years lending his expertise to assist inmates’ legal appeals. “I’ve been quite successful in helping inmates get off of death row,” he says with a pride that’s missing from most of his other recollections.

At one point during our conversation, he asked his wife to retrieve a letter he received the day before. It came from a prisoner on Florida’s death row; there is new evidence in his case that could exonerate him, the prisoner wrote in scratchy handwriting. Would McAndrew provide testimony to support his appeal?

McAndrew has forged unlikely relationships: He is the lone octogenarian Republican at most of the anti-death penalty events he attends.

At 88, he is unsure how much longer he can do this work. But, in his view, the work has never been more important.

His country is gradually turning against the death penalty. Recent polls by Gallup indicate 52% of Americans now favor it, down from 60% a decade ago and 71% when McAndrew was warden.

And there are signs that its use is diminishing. In 49 states, it is sought less often by prosecutors and carried out less often by prisons than it was several decades ago.

But Florida is resisting that trend. Between 2020 and 2024, the state killed seven people. Then, in 2025, it executed 19 inmates. It may match that number this year.

“I am ashamed of that fact,” McAndrew says.

McAndrew says he has written to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office several times, pleading with him to stop signing death warrants. He says he hasn’t heard back. DeSantis’s communications director, Alex Lanfranconi, told CNN in a statement: “My advice to those who are seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder people.”

News of the executions keeps finding its way to McAndrew, just as it did when he was six years old. So, his work continues. “I’m not finished yet,” he insists.

And when time is called on his own life, he sounds like a man who’s ready. McAndrew is Catholic, and says he believes in an afterlife.

As our conversation concludes, the heavens above his house open at last, and a thunderstorm erupts. He throws his eyebrows up towards the stormy skies. “There’s a lot of people waiting on me there,” he says.

每晚，罗恩·麦克安德鲁杀害的其中一个人都会坐在他的床脚，茫然地凝视着他饱受折磨的灵魂。

他知道他们要来了。他会挪动一下身子，腾出地方。“他们什么也没说，”麦克安德鲁回忆道，苍老的声音因回忆的沉重而略显沙哑。“他们只是坐在那里看着我。”但他们的眼神会说话。

他们会问：“你怎么能做出这种事？”麦克安德鲁说，“你一直声称自己是个好人。而现在你却在杀人。”

麦克安德鲁亲眼目睹八名被定罪的杀人犯的生命逝去至今已近三十年，但每一次死亡都深深地烙印在他的记忆中。他清晰地记得这份工作可怕的每一个细节：聆听囚犯的遗言，安排他们的最后一餐，以及发出执行死刑的无声信号。

麦克安德鲁曾任佛罗里达州立监狱典狱长，该监狱是佛罗里达州执行死刑的场所，直至1998年。他带领一个团队用电刑处死了三名囚犯，之后前往德克萨斯州协助对另外几名囚犯执行注射死刑。他坚信自己手下的一名囚犯是无辜的；另一次死刑执行出现失误，导致一名囚犯的头部着火。

他后悔莫及。“我曾经真的相信死刑，”他说。“今天，我简直不敢相信自己曾经那样想过。我真的无法相信。”

现年88岁的麦克安德鲁成了一位出人意料的死刑反对者。他正努力用余生来纠正自己犯下的八项错误。“我不得不反省自己，”在一个闷热的佛罗里达午后，他说道，“你会开始认真思考自己做过什么，以及为什么会那样做。”

但他的家乡却对他不利。自2025年初以来，佛罗里达州的死刑执行数量超过其他任何州，几乎与全国其他各州的死刑执行数量总和相当。周二，该州将执行今年的第16例死刑：77岁的柯蒂斯·比斯利（Curtis Beasley）因1995年用钝器击打致死一名女子而被定罪。他的律师辩称，比斯利的认知能力正在衰退，因此死刑不合理；佛罗里达州最高法院本周早些时候驳回了他的上诉。

该州频繁的死刑执行令麦克安德鲁感到痛苦不堪。他解释说，他不喜欢“死刑”这个词，语气从温和转为愤怒。“我更愿意称之为预谋的政治仪式谋杀。因为它的本质就是如此。”

这栋房子位于一个十字路口。就在麦克安德鲁家正下方，距离佛罗里达州盖恩斯维尔以南一小时车程的地方，彩虹河与威斯拉克奇河汇合。威斯拉克奇河发源于一片沼泽，蜿蜒流经佛罗里达州中部。罗恩的妻子琳恩说，她曾亲眼目睹一名男子在这条河上溺水身亡，他的船被一棵沉树缠住后倾覆。

蒂娜·罗素为CNN撰稿

每天，无论室内室外，麦克安德鲁都笼罩在死亡的阴影之下。他偶尔会思考自己的死亡，但更多的是思考他曾亲眼目睹的那些死亡。律师、维权团体和死囚都争相与麦克安德鲁交谈，希望能从这位背叛州政府的前典狱长身上获得一些启发。

于是他不断地重温这一切。当他在客厅里说话时，窗外的乌云渐渐加深，预示着暴风雨即将来临。他说话时，空气仿佛凝固了一般。麦克安德鲁生性幽默，但一旦思绪回到佛罗里达州立监狱，他的声音里便再也没有一丝笑意。

麦克安德鲁在1996年成为佛罗里达州监狱长时，是一位雄心勃勃的州惩教官员。这是一个责任重大的职位：佛罗里达州所有的死刑都在这里执行。“我当时非常渴望晋升，”他说。许多狱警都争相加入他的行刑队，这是一支备受瞩目的队伍，他们的工作是奉州长之命进行的。

当时的麦克安德鲁已经做好了执行死刑的准备。他能轻松回忆起每次行刑的细节。他说，州政府给了他40美元让他买最后一餐，如果不够，他就自掏腰包。

前一天晚上他会扮演教练的角色，把队员们召集起来进行赛前动员。“咖啡和甜甜圈我请客，”他会告诉他们，“但你们得付出代价，因为我想知道这里每个人的感受。”

一些警员仍然保留着一种黑色幽默，麦克安德鲁对此深恶痛绝。电椅被戏称为“老火花”，麦克安德鲁禁止使用这个绰号。“我们所做的一切都不是玩笑，”他会这样告诉他们。在当地人与他的队员击掌庆祝之后，他终止了一项传统——行刑后小组前往附近餐馆用餐。

每个命运攸关的清晨，麦克安德鲁都会去那名囚犯的牢房，向狱警示意允许他独处。此时，囚犯的生命已以分钟计算。牢门会发出金属撞击声关上；麦克安德鲁会走到床边，与那人进行他们最后的对话。

“现在只有你和我，”他告诉他们。“你有什么想说的吗？”

他发现这些人心事重重。“我尽力让他们感到安慰。”

他向每位囚犯承诺绝不会泄露谈话内容，而且他也信守了承诺。但当被问及他们的心理状态时，麦克安德鲁却沉默不语。

他的目光透过客厅的窗户，越过露台，望向远处沼泽般的水域，那里鳄鱼潜伏在水面之下。突然间，他仿佛回到了1997年——他的话语仍在继续，但脸色却变得阴沉起来。

“眼泪，”他终于开口说道。“焦虑。急促的跺脚。惊讶。”

最后，麦克安德鲁会脱掉戴着手铐的囚犯的鞋子——这是在进行冷酷的仪式之前，最后的亲密时刻。

然后他就离开了，留下他们单独待着。

在佛罗里达州的行刑室里，每个人都清楚自己的职责。首要任务是把犯人猛地摔到椅子上。“通过这种残忍的手段，”麦克安德鲁解释说，“可以给犯人带来一种冲击，这种冲击实际上能让他们平静下来。至少暂时如此。”

囚犯被重击打得踉跄后退，行刑队随即把他绑在椅子上。麦克安德鲁负责的是他的右脚踝。八年前，连环杀人犯泰德·邦迪在这里被执行死刑。狱警们至今仍津津乐道他当时的反抗。

麦克安德鲁说：“他们说他力气相当于十二个人。”

接下来的流程冷酷而高效地进行着。麦克安德鲁会把麦克风放在囚犯面前，询问他们的遗言。与此同时，26名证人——他称他们为“法官、律师、公民、好奇者、嗜血的混蛋”——在一旁观看并做笔记。

麦克安德鲁说，一个皮质面具紧紧地绑在男人脸上，“勒得太紧，鼻子都快被勒断了”。他回忆说，每次都会有鲜血从面具下流出来。“但他们发不出声音。”

州长随后会打电话告诉麦克安德鲁：“没有暂缓执行令，没有暂缓执行令。”

接下来是一场令人毛骨悚然的表演。麦克安德鲁会向一个身穿黑袍、头戴兜帽、藏在半堵墙后的男人发出一个不易察觉的暗号。这名男子是刽子手，麦克安德鲁每次以150美元的价格雇佣他，就连监狱工作人员也不知道他的真实身份。这是一种只有一种含义的秘密语言。这个暗号的意思是“拉下拉杆”。

麦克安德鲁最近说话轻声细语，声音时而消散在空气中。他以前常驾船出海，但如今，他的生活节奏缓慢而沉稳。他花大量时间思考一切：像用算盘上的珠子一样，权衡着善恶。

他的人生经历丰富多彩。第一段人生始于1938年的北卡罗来纳州，经济大萧条和战争塑造了他的童年。

有时，他会从收音机里听到罗利市执行死刑的消息，而他所在的乡村小镇也会收到这样的消息。“就像圣经里说的那样，”他的祖父，一位抚养他长大的卫理公会牧师，会这样解释道，“以眼还眼，以牙还牙。”

“你会把这种经历一直带到成年时期，”麦克安德鲁说。“这是你性格的一部分，它不会轻易消失。”

这件事一直伴随着他，贯穿了他之后几段截然不同的人生：在空军服役两年；结了四次婚；在海外卖了十年香水。20世纪70年代，麦克安德鲁丢了销售工作后，从朋友那里听说佛罗里达州的一所监狱急需人手。他笑着说：“你觉得我会去监狱工作吗？”

他最终在多所监狱工作过。麦克安德鲁警官先后晋升为警长、中尉和少校。最终，他被任命为斯塔克州立监狱的典狱长。斯塔克是一个被铁路一分为二的小镇，监狱的运转离不开狱警的辛勤付出。

但首先，有人问麦克安德鲁，他是否会介意将战俘送上断头台。“不，先生，”他回答说。“以眼还眼，以牙还牙。”

事情很快发生了变化。“我知道自己内心深处有些异样，”他说。他开始对囚犯的生活着迷，甚至把案卷带回家。他越来越担心一名被判死刑的囚犯利奥·琼斯，琼斯因在杰克逊维尔枪杀一名警察而被定罪。琼斯坚称自己无罪，并表示他的供词是被迫的。“这次调查简直糟糕透顶，”麦克安德鲁说道。

他把这件事告诉了他的老板，麦克安德鲁说，老板的回应是：“罗恩，别他妈碰那些记录。那不是你的工作。”琼斯于1998年被执行死刑。

那段时间，麦克安德鲁几乎彻夜未眠。即使睡着了，那些幻象也会浮现：那些被判死刑的囚犯在他的脑海中再次复活，静静地坐在他的床垫上。

他说话时，饱经风霜的双手紧紧抓住价值7000美元的电动轮椅。这让他与佛罗里达州的狱友们产生了一种诡异的共鸣：当他描述他们最后的举动，以及他们徒劳地抵抗致命打击的努力时，他的身体也随之颤抖起伏。

麦克安德鲁第三次被执行死刑时，他每晚都酗酒以麻痹痛苦。他曾想过自杀。他指着妻子琳恩说，如果不是她，他早就这么做了。

然后，在 1997 年 3 月，一名名叫佩德罗·梅迪纳的死刑犯被绑在了椅子上。

“我依然是无辜的！”梅迪纳对着麦克风喊道。这名因在奥兰多持刀伤人而被定罪的囚犯，一直坚称自己没有犯罪。但这些话——如同梅迪纳生命中最后疯狂的尾声——如今已毫无意义。面罩遮住了他的脸，麦克安德鲁打了个手势。

“先是一声爆裂声，”他说。麦克安德鲁回忆道，随后一团巨大的火焰爆发出来。突然间，梅迪纳的头部着火了，房间里充满了黑烟。

电工转向麦克安德鲁，问道：“继续吗？”麦克安德鲁神情严肃地说：“当时我根本停不下来，我说‘是’，继续。”在充满遗憾的一生中，麦克安德鲁最后悔的就是这一个字。

尸体的腐臭味令人作呕，始终萦绕在他的衣服上。麦克安德鲁命令手下打开窗户。气味飘到外面，向上飘去，进入了牢房区。“死囚牢房里的其他囚犯都能闻到佩德罗·梅迪纳被活活烧死的气味，”他说。

尸检结果显示梅迪纳死得毫无痛苦，但麦克安德鲁用极其露骨的语言否认了这一结论。“他的头骨都快掉下来了，”他说，“我们简直是把他活活烧死了。”

那是麦克安德鲁一生中最糟糕的一天。几个小时里，他一直在办公室里踱步，全国新闻频道都在报道这起骇人听闻的谋杀案。他不停地接听妻子打来的焦急电话。

“整个过程很难从脑海中抹去，”他说。他花了数年时间试图摆脱它，先是酗酒，后来又接受心理治疗。但“我现在这个年纪了，不想让它浮出水面，”他说。“我想记住它。”

“有人故意把我推到这个位置，因为我必须来这里，”他说。“佛罗里达州从来没有一位监狱长像我这样周游世界，公开反对死刑。”

“如果有人愿意站在我面前，听我讲完我的故事，我一定会讲出来。”

麦克安德鲁的故事并没有在那一天结束，而是走向了不同的方向。梅迪纳的死刑执行预示着佛罗里达州电刑的终结。一位愤怒的州长将他借调到德克萨斯州进行实地考察，让他亲身感受该州正在使用的一种新型死刑方式：注射死刑。

这种方法现在已成为美国大多数州（包括佛罗里达州）的默认死刑执行方式。支持者称，之所以采用这种方法，是因为它是一种更人道的结束生命的方式。“这根本不人道，”麦克安德鲁说。他说，他是德克萨斯州执行死刑小组的成员，该小组用这种药物杀死了五名男子。“如果这种方法人道，他们就不需要用八条皮带把人固定住。”

麦克安德鲁在2002年退役时，已经心灰意冷。他花了几个月的时间沉浸在悔恨之中。

“我真希望我从未去过佛罗里达州立监狱，”他说。“我真希望我从未涉足那肮脏的行当。”

然后他开始着手弥补自己所犯下的所有错误。

他走遍美国各地，公开反对死刑，并多年来运用自己的专业知识帮助囚犯进行法律上诉。“我帮助很多囚犯摆脱死刑，而且相当成功，”他自豪地说，这种自豪感在他回忆其他事情时几乎看不到。

谈话间，他曾让妻子去取他前一天收到的一封信。信是佛罗里达州一名死囚寄来的，信中用潦草的字迹写道，他的案子有了新的证据，可能证明他无罪。麦克安德鲁是否愿意提供证词支持他的上诉？

麦克安德鲁建立了一些意想不到的关系：在他参加的大多数反对死刑的活动中，他都是唯一的八旬共和党人。

他今年88岁，不确定自己还能做多久这项工作。但在他看来，这项工作从未像现在这样重要。

他的国家正逐渐反对死刑。盖洛普最近的民意调查显示，现在有52%的美国人支持死刑，低于十年前的60%和麦克安德鲁担任典狱长时的71%。

而且有迹象表明，这种做法的使用正在减少。在49个州，检察官寻求这种做法的频率以及监狱执行这种做法的频率都比几十年前要低。

但佛罗里达州正在抵制这种趋势。2020年至2024年间，该州仅处决了7人。然而，2025年，该州却处决了19名囚犯。今年的处决人数可能与此持平。

“我为此感到羞愧，”麦克安德鲁说。

麦克安德鲁表示，他曾多次致信佛罗里达州州长罗恩·德桑蒂斯的办公室，恳求他停止签署死刑执行令。他说，他一直没有收到回复。德桑蒂斯的通讯主任亚历克斯·兰弗兰科尼在一份声明中告诉CNN：“我对那些想在佛罗里达州逃避死刑的人的建议是：不要杀人。”

就像他六岁时一样，处决的消息不断传到麦克安德鲁耳中。所以，他的工作仍在继续。“我还没完成，”他坚持说。

当他的生命走到尽头时，他听起来像是已经做好了准备。麦克安德鲁是天主教徒，他说他相信有来世。

谈话即将结束时，他家上空终于裂开一道口子，暴雨倾盆而下。他抬头望向风雨交加的天空，扬起眉毛。“那儿有不少人等着我呢。”他说。