Not long after Ron McAndrew was hired by the Dade County Correctional Institution in 1979, he realized he had found his niche.

For 15 years he had traveled the world as a sales representative, but now he'd be in one place and could sink his teeth into his job. His goal: to become warden.

He rose through the ranks, and by 1996, he was the warden of Florida State Prison in Starke, where death-row inmates are kept. Three weeks after he started, he oversaw his first execution.

It changed him forever.

"After you witness your first execution — if you don't go away questioning the death penalty — you're not human," McAndrew said during a phone interview from his home in Dunnellon.

His attitude toward the death penalty didn't change overnight, but by 1999, after overseeing two more executions at Florida State Prison, and witnessing five more in Texas, he began to speak out against the practice.

On Monday, he'll speak at the Co-Cathedral of St. Thomas More about what caused him to change his mind. One organizer of the event said the sponsors — Tallahassee Citizens Against the Death Penalty (TCADP), Pax Christi and the Florida Catholic Conference — wanted to bring McAndrew to town around Easter.

"I think it's particularly poignant around this time because that's exactly what happened to Jesus — his life was taken by the state," said Shimon Gottschalk, a member of TCADP.

Gottschalk said his hope is that people will become more educated about the issue and that the mood in the country will shift, just like McAndrew's did. He said be believes our attitude toward the death penalty is revealing.

"In the same way that taking your temperature . . . (gives) you an indication of what is happening in the body, the death penalty is a good indicator of how we feel in society about our fellow human beings," he said.

According to a 2007 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 62 percent of the American public supports the death penalty. Most people in the religious community support the death penalty, including 74 percent of evangelicals and 68 percent of those in mainline denominations.

The Southern Baptist Convention, for instance, passed a resolution in 2000 supporting the "fair and equitable use of capital punishment." In 1973, the National Association of Evangelicals passed something similar. On its Web site, it states: "If no crime is considered serious enough to warrant capital punishment, then the gravity of the most atrocious crime is diminished accordingly. It follows then that the attitude of criminals will be affected."

Internationally, support for the death penalty seems to be waning. In December, the United Nations adopted a moratorium against the death penalty by a 104-54 vote, although it's not legally binding. (The U.S. voted against it.) Two similar moratoriums in the 1990s had failed.

McAndrew isn't the only former correctional official who has had a change of heart about the death penalty. Dennis O'Neill, an assistant warden at Florida State Prison during the 1980s, had a similar experience. (After leaving the correctional system in 2001, he became an Episcopal priest.)

O'Neill, who once hired McAndrew for a job in Central Florida, said he compartmentalized his experience of witnessing two executions.

"I use the analogy of a shoebox," he said in a telephone interview from his church in Starke. "I would take it off the shelf, do what I had to do, and pack it back up."

He said two main things caused him to oppose the death penalty now. One was reading research that showed the racial disparity of those being executed. He vividly remembers one researcher saying that in Florida, a white person had never been put to death for killing a black person.

"That was a wake-up call," he said.

The other thing was reading about the Nuremberg trials that took place after the Holocaust. He discovered that the people who did all the killing were just ordinary people doing their jobs.

"One man, who oversaw thousands of deaths during the day, went to opera with his wife and family at night," he said. "There was that disconnect."

He doesn't compare himself or others in the correctional system to Nazi war criminals, but he feels the ability to compartmentalize his life was similar.

Today, the death penalty is not a big part of his ministry, but he's been willing to talk about it when asked, as he did during a visit to Holy Comforter Episcopal Church in Tallahassee last year.

McAndrew, who converted to Catholicism in 2003, said in his job as warden at Florida State Prison, he spent a lot of time with the prisoner during the last few weeks of his life. He'd deal with the prisoner's family, his attorney, the media. On the last day, he'd sit on the edge of the bunk with the offender and read him the death warrant. He'd tell him he didn't have any desire to go through with the execution, but it was required by law. He'd ask the offender for any last words. Then, with the man in shackles, and two officers at the offender's side, he'd walk with the condemned man into the execution chambers.

Today, at night, the men that he executed now come and sit on the edge of his bed.

He doesn't know when, or if, they'll ever go away.