Huntsville Unit

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Main entrance area of ​​the Huntsville Unit

The Huntsville State Prison (officially English: Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville ), colloquially known as the Huntsville Unit , is the oldest state prison in the US state of Texas and is operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice . The prison is best known for the executions that take place here , which are carried out more numerous than in any other state.

The penal institution, which opened in 1849, can accommodate up to 1,705 male prisoners, who are monitored and looked after by around 465 employees. The detention center is also known as the “Walls Unit” because of the 10 meter high, red brick walls that surround the prison area.

Death penalty and death row

"Walls Unit"

In the Huntsville Unit, executions were still carried out by hanging until 1923 , before an inmate-built electric chair called the Old Sparky was introduced in 1924, on which 361 inmates were executed from February 8, 1924 to July 30, 1964. Until 1965 the Huntsville Unit was also the Texas Death Row , but due to a lack of space it was moved to the Ellis Unit , some 20 km outside of Huntsville. In 1972, when the US Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional, the death penalty for the 52 convicts still on death row was commuted to life imprisonment .

When the death penalty was reintroduced in the United States in 1976, an execution chamber was set up in the Huntsville Unit and has been used for lethal injection ever since .

On Thanksgiving 1998, seven death row inmates attempted to escape from Ellis Unit . Six of them were able to be overpowered on the prison grounds, the inmate Martin Gurule managed to overcome two barbed-wire-reinforced outer walls and to escape the surrounding watchtowers despite the gunfire. However, seven days later, his body was found not far from Huntsville. He died from a gunshot wound sustained in the breakout. As a result of this incident, death row was transferred to the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston in 1999, from where the inmates are now being transferred to the Huntsville Unit shortly before their execution. The female death row inmates, however, are in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville .

Since the death penalty was reintroduced, 528 people have died from lethal injection in the Huntsville Unit between December 1982 and August 2015. That's more executions than any other executing state. In 1997 there were 37 executions.

Incidents

On September 1, 1921, two inmates reached the east wall of the prison, overpowered and handcuffed the 43-year-old prison guard Dewitt Oliver, and then threw him off the wall. Shortly afterwards, the two prisoners managed to escape with the guard's weapons. Dewitt Oliver died 16 days later of serious internal injuries, while the two escaped were caught again on September 3rd. One of the perpetrators was shot dead while trying to escape again on September 12 of the same year.

On July 22, 1934, one of the most spectacular prison breakouts in American judicial history occurred ; Whitey Walker, the leader of the then legendary Whitey Walker Gang , had been imprisoned with his accomplices Roy Johnson and Blackie Thompson in the Huntsville Unit, where Thompson was awaiting execution of his death sentence. Walker tried to save his friend from death and therefore got in touch with the "prison legend" Eldridge Roy Johnson, known as Charles Frazier. Before being transferred to the Huntsville Unit, Frazier had had nine successful prison escapes and had made three escape attempts himself from Huntsville. With the help of a prison guard who had smuggled a firearm into the detention center, Frazier took two guards hostage and forced them, one by one, to free inmates Thompson, Walker, and Johnson, and two other inmates, Charles Palmer and Ray Hamilton, from their cells. Then Thompson, Hamilton and Palmer managed to escape over the prison wall into the open. Whitey Walker and Charles Frazier were shot while trying to climb the wall as well. Walker died from a lung wound while Frazier survived despite four gunshot wounds. The event was later written down by Patrick M. McConal in the book "Over The Wall: The Men Behind the 1934 Death House Escape" .

On November 23, 1946, two inmates who were posted outside the prison during repair work overcame 55-year-old prison guard Benjamin LaRue and beat him to death with a hammer. After a short escape, one of the perpetrators was shot and the other injured was arrested again.

From July 24 to August 3, 1974, one of the longest and most sensational hostage-taking in US history took place in the Huntsville Unit . Three armed prisoners took several prison staff and fellow inmates hostage and holed up in the prison library classroom. After an armored car was made available to them, as requested, the perpetrators surrounded themselves with book-reinforced, portable blackboards in the middle of which were hostages, while the other hostages surrounded the escapes in a ring and protected them with their bodies. On the way across the prison yard, the police had planned to overpower this marching column with water cannons , but this did not succeed and instead a firefight developed in which two perpetrators and two hostages were killed and the third perpetrator was arrested. He was sentenced to death for murdering the hostages and executed in 1991. This event was written down by William Harper in the book Eleven Days in Hell .

Known former inmates

  • Pimp C , rapper and hip-hop producer

Known executed people

Others

Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery is located on Peckerwood Hill , Huntsville , and is the burial place of all those who died in custody or from execution and for whom there was no relative to pay the burial costs. For decades, the dead were given a simple, white stone cross on which only the inmate number and the date of death were written. If there was an executed person in the grave, this was indicated by an additional X. In the meantime, the stone crosses have been replaced by plaques on which the name of the deceased is now also noted. The cemetery is named after Joe Byrd, who carried out the electric chair executions in the Huntsville Unit from 1936 to 1964.

Also in Huntsville is the Texas Prison Museum , where u. a. the electric chair “Old Sparky”, the execution utensils of Charlie Brooks and weapons made by inmates themselves are on display. The museum is run by former Huntsville Unit prison director Jim Willett. Willett directed all 89 executions of that period from 1989 to 2001, making him the prison director with the most directed executions in US history.

From 1931 to 1986, the so-called Texas Prison Rodeo was held almost annually not far from the Huntsville Unit , in which inmates competed against each other in disciplines such as "milking wild cow", "milking wild mare", "riding wild cow" or the usual rodeo bull riding . The highlight of the event was the so-called "Hard Money Event", in which up to 40 inmates in red T-shirts streamed into an arena to give a wild bull a pouch between the horns containing tobacco and up to 1,500 US dollars. Dollars found to decrease.

Web links

Commons : Huntsville Unit  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 30 ° 43 ′ 21.2 "  N , 95 ° 32 ′ 47.4"  W.