Washington state's only execution chamber will be closed at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla on Wednesday (September 18), with departing three-term governor Jay Inslee attending an official closure ceremony.

Cal Coburn Brown was the last inmate to be executed by lethal injection at the prison, for the 1991 kidnapping, rape and murder of 21-year-old Holly Washa. Brown was on death row for more than 16 years before being executed on September 10, 2010.

Former Department of Correction Secretary Richard "Dick" Morgan, who once oversaw executions and later worked to have the death penalty abolished in the state, told Reuters he is happy to see the chamber shut down.

"I think the death penalty in general is too much to ask a servant of the state to do," said Morgan, who participated in three executions during his 35 year career in the state's prison system. "I care about these people that have to carry out their daily jobs and asking anybody to kill someone is a bridge too far."

Morgan said if given the choice, he would prefer to die by hanging.

"From the time you start the process to the time that you're dead is very brief with hanging, and it seems interminably long for a lethal injection," he said, citing the medical process involved.

Reuters was recently shown inside the rooms of the death chamber, which still contain some of the tools that were used to end the lives of 78 people, all men, between 1904 and Brown's execution in 2010. The clock on the wall in the execution chamber was stopped at the time the last death sentence was carried out.

Morgan officially retired from his position as Director of Prisons at Washington Department of Corrections in 2010, but has returned for various roles and appointments in the years since, while regularly speaking out against the death penalty.

"The legal justice system is flawed. It's a human invention, and innocent people do wind up in prison. Innocent people can be convicted and sentenced to death," Morgan said. "I can't think of a nightmare worse than being involved in executing somebody that it turns out later never should have been."

In 2014, during his first term in office, Inslee announced that a reprieve would be issued for any death penalty case that reached his desk. Four years later, the Washington Supreme Court declared the state's death penalty statue unconstitutional, but the law still remained on the books.

That ended with Inslee's signing of Senate Bill 5087 on April 20, 2023, removing it from state law and officially abolishing the death penalty in the state.

(Production: Matt M. McKnight)