Miss. prison warden Donald Cabana, 67; came to oppose death penalty

JACKSON, Miss. -- Donald A. Cabana, a longtime corrections official who oversaw executions as warden at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the 1980s and later opposed the death penalty, died Monday. He was 67.

Cabana died at Wesley Medical Center in Hattiesburg after a long illness, the Mississippi Department of Corrections said.

He spent 40 years in corrections, including stints as warden at Parchman and commissioner of the state Department of Corrections. He also was chair of the criminal justice programs at the University of Southern Mississippi and William Carey University.

In the 1980s, Cabana supervised executions of two men convicted of capital murder, Edward Earl Johnson and Connie Ray Evans.

In his memoir "Death At Midnight: The Confessions of an Executioner," Cabana recounted how he came to oppose the death penalty. In the book's preface, Cabana wrote that he spent most of his career as a prison administrator convinced of the need for capital punishment.

"I had always been something of a bureaucratic utopian, fully committed to the notion that if the government deemed capital punishment necessary then it must be so. . . . Not until I was confronted with supervising and carrying out the ultimate retribution did I begin to question the process in earnest.

"The execution of Edward Earl Johnson served as a milestone, an event at which to pause and wonder. But it was the execution of Connie Ray Evans that became, for me, a personal moment of truth," Cabana wrote.

Cabana said he and Evans had become friends during the inmate's years on death row. He said in his book that he went as far as to ask the governor to commute Evans' death sentence.

Cabana said he "violated my cardinal rule never to get close to your clients," allowing himself to befriend Evans, who was put to death for killing a convenience store clerk in 1981.

In testimony before a Minnesota legislative committee in 1995, Cabana said: "However we do it, in the name of justice, in the name of law and order, in the name of retribution, you . . . do not have the right to ask me, or any prison official, to bloody my hands with an innocent person's blood. . . . If we wrongfully incarcerate somebody, we can correct that wrong. But if we execute an innocent person by mistake, what is it we're supposed to say -- 'Oops'?"