Word: burle
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...worth listening to the man who presides over the country's largest maximum-security prison, who actually holds the hands of the men he is ordered to execute before they die and who tells them to "get ready to see the face of Jesus." Angola prison warden Burl Cain figures his job will probably wreck his marriage eventually. "My wife, she doesn't like that she's married a killer," he says. "There are very few things I hide from, but I hide from that." Cain tries to make the system work as best he can, but he hates...
Howard has just served us four plates of the best chocolate-chip cookies I've ever eaten when Warden Burl Cain tells us that Howard killed a man and is going to die an old man in prison for it. It's flat as that, but it exposes the most intimate, relevant detail of Howard's life. I don't want to look at him, but I do, and Howard doesn't flinch. Howard's sad eyes don't change, don't feign remorse or regret, just stay sad, and his gold-plated teeth are the only thing that hints...
There are 88 men on death row, and Burl Cain has killed more people than most of them. He has set five down by lethal injection, and he has held each of their hands as they died. One man had track marks so bad they had to shoot the poison into his neck, and he kept bolting upright, so Cain had to push his shoulder down with his right hand while letting the man hold Cain's left for comfort. The table has five straps on the gurney--two leg manacles, two wristbands and one chest belt--making a horizontal...
...months ago, though, some prisoners lost it, lost the hope, and one of them took a guard hostage. Burl Cain couldn't talk the hope back into him, and they had a shootout. "He got one of ours, and we got one of theirs," he says. "It all worked out in the end." And wrong as that sounds, in Angola that's how it is, and there's no hiding from it, and I feel so lucky to go back to a place where heaven and hell and sin and redemption are just philosophy...