My Father the Executioner
Donald A. Cabana
Donald A. Cabana was born Dominic Arturo Spinelli in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1945, and entered the foster care system soon after. He was adopted by Samuel and Dorothy Cabana and chose to change his name at ten years old. He and his wife, Miriam Sue Ables, had six children, Scott, Michelle, Ashley, Angela, Christopher, and Kristin. He served as a warden for several prisons around the United States. After presiding over multiple executions, Cabana became a passionate opponent of the death penalty, as chronicled in his memoir, Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner. He died in 2013, at age sixty-seven.
Donald with five-month-old Kristin (right) and her twin brother, Christopher, at their house at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, 1985
we’d sit on the back-porch swing, just Dad and me, holding hands, rocking back and forth after dinner while he quizzed me on our favorite subjects.
“What’s the capital of Vermont?”
“In what year did the Salem Witch Trials take place?”
“Who was the last baseball player to hit .400?”
As an eight-year-old with five siblings, I cherished those moments between the two of us. My dad had just finished his career as a prison warden, and we had moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he had begun working on his PhD in adult education at the University of Southern Mississippi. Whereas when he was a warden, my twin brother and I had played in large prison conference rooms, we now spent hours running up and down the steep, narrow staircase that led to his office in McCleskey Hall, a crumbling relic of 1930s building codes.
Even then, as a doctoral candidate, he began to lecture at Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale. We regularly answered phone calls at our home from Dateline and the Today show. A German film crew came to our house to make a documentary, and Chris Cuomo arrived in our tiny town to interview both of my parents for 20/20. I remember that last incident well, because my mother made us clean our kitchen meticulously for days beforehand, terrified that the tiniest speck of dirt or grime might appear in the background on national television. The media sought my father’s opinion as one of the few “death penalty experts” in the United States, as he had presided over two executions at the Mississippi State Penitentiary as warden and participated in others in Missouri and Florida. He spoke out unabashedly against the practice, becoming a somber voice of experience within the anti–death penalty community.
To me and my siblings, though, he was simply Dad. We teased him about every interview, knowing that the man we saw looking so professional and serious on television came home and played made-up games like “Just the Daughters, Not the Sons” and “Park Bench.” (The premises and the rules changed every time we played.) All six of us spent countless hours trying to free ourselves from headlocks, noogies, and games in which my dad could use his considerable strength against us.
He taught us to both cheer and curse the Red Sox, swearing at their every mistake. The Yankees, though, particularly Derek Jeter, were the subject of his most vociferous baseball-fueled outbursts. To quote one of Dad’s favorite movie characters, Ralphie from A Christmas Story, my father “worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium.” He also applied his medium to burned food, bad drivers, and my brothers.
Dad didn’t ever lecture us about the death penalty or his thoughts on the justice system. We spent most nights simply talking around the dinner table with him and my mom, whose conversations with us and with each other served as teaching enough. In fact, most of the time when Dad held court at the dinner table, we ended up rolling around laughing. We’d start talking about the news or someone at school, and somehow or another it would remind him of a funny anecdote. Dad had a great sense of humor and also a knack for using different voices and mannerisms to bring these experiences to life; he was the consummate storyteller.
Amid the laughter, there were moments of seriousness, such as when he brought his profession home with him. He returned to the Mississippi State Penitentiary when I was in college, and later served as warden in a regional jail closer to Hattiesburg. Sometimes, after an incident at work, he would stare off into space and muse, almost to the wall instead of any one person, about how he couldn’t understand some of the people he worked with, inmates and prison officials alike. Those who didn’t feel empathy. Those who abused children or murdered in cold blood. Those who lorded their authority over others.
For the most part, however, he was as optimistic as anyone in his profession could be. His Catholic faith remained important to him throughout his life, buoying his spirit and giving him a perspective all too often disregarded in his line of work. He believed that people can and do change. For him, that included inmates, whom he felt had been entrusted to his care. Perhaps the most poignant evidence of this belief came after he died. When my brother and I cleaned out Dad’s office, amid his boxes of awards and honors, we found numerous poems, letters, and illustrations inmates had given to him throughout his career. They thanked him for treating them with respect. For giving them hope. For helping them change.
My memories of my father, in the years after his death, don’t revolve around his accolades. Like all who knew him, I remember most how he made me feel: loved. In my mind, Dad isn’t standing behind a podium, giving a speech. Nor is he walking the halls, checking prison cells. For me, Dad is still sitting on that back-porch swing after dinner, holding my hand and asking questions.