December 3, 1952 - Jerry Givens
Givens occupies an unusual place in the history of American capital punishment — not as a perpetrator of harm in the conventional sense, but as the man whose hands carried out the state's most irreversible act sixty-two times over seventeen years. His later reversal on capital punishment, after leaving the role, added a rare dimension of public reflection to a position that is almost never examined from the inside. The arc of his career raises questions about institutional complicity and personal conscience that historians of criminal justice continue to grapple with.
From Wikipedia
Jerry Bronson Givens (December 3, 1952 – April 13, 2020) was the chief executioner of Virginia from 1982 until 1999, during which he executed 62 people, including two of the Briley Brothers. He spent most of his career in Virginia's correctional system, and was initially a supporter of capital punishment. However, beginning in 1999, he served a four-year prison sentence for money laundering and perjury, the latter of which is a felony in the Commonwealth of Virginia. This led to the termination of his career at the Virginia Department of Corrections and the loss of his title as Chief Executioner of Virginia. This experience, together with the revelation that Earl Washington Jr. was innocent, transformed Givens into an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, which he spent the rest of his life campaigning against. He died from COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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