It’s been nearly a quarter-century since Oregon put anyone to death but the state remains ready.
The Oregon Department of Corrections execution chamber lies deep inside the state’s oldest prison in Salem. The entrance to the three-room suite is unmarked. A window on the door is covered.
The space sits undisturbed, suspended in time.
The department allowed an Oregonian/OregonLive reporter and photographer to see the chamber on a recent visit to the Oregon State Penitentiary. The news organization requested a tour in light of a new law passed last year that represents the first major legislative restriction to Oregon’s death penalty since 1984, when voters amended the constitution to include capital punishment.
“We keep it sanitary and clean,” said Corrections Capt. Toby Tooley. “We get a lot of visitors. We have a lot of interest in seeing it. It’s more of a historical stop.”
The compact rooms -- a small holding cell, a shower room and the execution chamber itself -- feel like a vestige from another era. And in a way they are. The last person put to death in Oregon was Henry Charles Moore. Moore, sentenced to death for the 1992 murders of his father-in-law and mother-in-law, died at 12:23 a.m. on May 16, 1997.
In 2011, the state prepared the rooms again after a judge signed the death warrant for Gary Haugen, a twice-convicted killer. The plan to execute Haugen came after the killer waived his legal appeals.
But two weeks before Haugen’s planned execution date, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber imposed a moratorium on executions, calling capital punishment “morally wrong” and arguing that Oregon’s system “fails to meet basic standards of justice.” Courts upheld the reprieve.
Haugen remains on death row, a two-tiered unit of cells steps from the execution chamber.
Twenty-eight men and one woman are sentenced to die, though in all likelihood they will never set foot inside the chamber.
That’s because Oregon’s approach to the death penalty has shifted, reflecting national trends. Polling shows support for the death penalty has dropped significantly since the mid 1990s. About 56 percent of Americans said they support capital punishment in a poll done two years ago compared to 80 percent in 1994.
Today, 29 states, including Oregon, have the death penalty. Four of them, like Oregon have a moratorium that Kitzhaber began and Gov. Kate Brown has extended.
The ranks of the condemned are expected to taper off too.
Legislation passed last year was designed to reduce Oregon’s use of the death penalty. The law now limits aggravated murder to four categories: killing another person while locked in jail or prison for a previous murder, killing two or more people as an act of organized terrorism, killing a child younger than 14 intentionally and with premeditation and killing a police, correctional or probation officer intentionally and with premeditation.
While policy and public sentiment may have changed, Oregon’s execution chamber has not.
To get there, you must walk through three locked gates at Oregon’s only maximum-security prison, then pass through the main building and back outside.
From there, the route takes you along a wide paved walkway known as “the avenue,” which separates a towering cellblock from the recreation yard.
(Even in a recent downpour, hundreds of men walked and congregated in the muddy yard under the eye of armed corrections officers who look over the massive open space from towers.)
The walk continues to a dingy yellow building in a far corner of the prison compound where some of the state’s most challenging inmates are kept, along with death row and the execution chamber.
The suite remains preserved like a Cold War-era bomb shelter. The clock on the wall no longer keeps time. The batteries are dead. The body restraints are made of leather. White sheets line a gurney where the inmate would, in theory, be injected with a lethal three-drug cocktail.
Today the drugs would be almost impossible for the state to obtain due to objections from the drug makers who don’t want their medicines used in executions.
The holding cell where prison protocol says the condemned must be kept for 48 hours before execution sits unused but ready: the bed is made, a purple pillowcase is on the pillow. A drab wool blanket is wrapped around the mattress pad in the otherwise empty space.
A long checklist still hangs on the wall. It’s been there so long that Tooley, the captain of the unit, isn’t quite sure when it was posted. It details 25 steps between the time witnesses are brought into the viewing area and when the mortuary removes the body of the condemned.
Two push-button phones, one red and the other blue, hang on the wall. Each is marked with black letters: governor and attorney general.
The state’s execution protocol requires that the governor and attorney general give the go-ahead before the lethal injection is administered.
The mothballed suite today exists as a necessity but also a curiosity.
The Department of Corrections does not permit public tours of its prisons, but a few times a month, the staff opens the rooms to small groups of lawyers, judges and college students.
Said Tooley: “It’s only used for tours and executions.”
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
