Prison warden Don Cabana presided at an execution for the first time in his career at the stroke of midnight on a summer day in 1987. He was a conservative man at the toughest prison in the state of Mississippi. By 8 the next morning, Cabana was back at his desk, bewildered. Then the phone rang.

"Just checking in," said Morris L. Thigpen, who ran the jails in the next state over, Alabama. "I wanted to see how you're feeling today."

"Twenty-five years I prepared for last night, and still it surprised me," said Cabana. "It caught me unawares."

"Looks like we got a whole bunch coming up," said Thigpen.

"I don't wish it on anyone," said Cabana.

Eight executions later, Thigpen would write:

"I have often heard indviduals who have never participated in an execution say they would be more than willing to pull the switch, drop the pellet or inject the needle.

"On the other hand, I have never heard anyone who has participated in an execution say, 'I would like to do that again.' "

It seems certain that New York State will have a death penalty law in 1995. The executions will not be carried out by the politicians who pass the law, the governor who signs it, nor the public who elected them.

The job is done by proxies, in private: corrections guards, lab technicians, prison administrators.

"You don't hear a lot about its effect on the people who have to do these executions," Cabana said yesterday. "It surprised me in terms of its brutality. I came to dread it. It started me questioning the use of the death penalty."

A few months after calling Cabana to buck him up, Alabama Corrections Commissioner Thigpen had to preside at executions in his own system. The state was electrocuting a retarded man who had raped a woman, then stabbed her 66 times and left her tied to a tree. The woman's husband found her when he came home.

The sentence was carried out in Holman Prison. After the switch was thrown on the 2,000-volt feeder cables, a pair of doctors stepped up to make the pronouncement. They lifted the mask and saw no sign of life in the man's face.

Then one of them placed the stethoscope on the chest.

"Got a strong heartbeat," said the doctor. "He's alive."

A guard spotted a problem in the wiring. "I believe we got the jacks on wrong," he said.

In some states, the law permits two attempts at execution, then commutes the sentence to life. In Alabama, the law requires that electricity be applied until the prisoner is dead.

"With the condemned man's father and his principal attorney standing less than two feet away, I remember telling the warden that we would have to proceed with a second attempt," Thigpen wrote in an article for "Corrections Today."

"They're torturing him," said the father.

The next attempt worked. Thigpen later explained he hoped and believed that the man had been unconscious after the first jolt.

Thigpen was accused of going soft on a dreadful criminal. But he took a different view of the people he put to death - neither excusing the murders that brought them to prison, nor pretending that the state's actions were sterile lab procedures.

"The crimes they committed are heinous," Thigpen wrote. "However, I still feel compassion for them. I wonder what events in their lives led them to commit a capital offense. Was there some point at which intervention of some type might have changed the course of events?"

In Mississippi, Cabana initially believed that capital punishment was a necessary part of the system. After the first execution, he presided over a second, just four weeks later.

"This one was, if anything, worse," he said. "It was a kid I had come to know fairly well over four or five years. As the months dwindled, it became intense. I saw him too much, in a way. On the other hand, I don't have any regrets about that."

Cabana spent four years with the Air Force in Vietnam, then came back to Mississipi and worked his way to the warden's office at the huge prison farm called Parchman.

"You get into this thing believing that you can make a difference, that people can and do change," said Cabana. "Whether anyone chooses to believe it or not, you take the most conservative, toughest guard, and put them in daily contact with a death row prisoner for 8 or 10 years - they're going to not like it when the day comes. You're not executing the same guy that came in 10 years before."

After the second execution, Cabana transferred to a new job to avoid the dirty work.

"A colleague who was in the business 30-something years told me, 'If they ask me to do it again, my career is over, because I won't do it again,'" said Cabana. "I know some folks in the business don't dread it as much as I did. I have heard, 'you were just doing your job' so often that I have thought if I hear that one more time, I would slap someone."

He remembers driving the 21,000 acres of the prison farm after those executions, unable to sleep. And his friend, Thigpen, wrote of a similar wandering. "How accountable will I be for my role in executions at the end of my life?" said Thigpen.

"After each execution, I felt as though I left another part of my humanity and my spiritual being in that viewing room."

Thigpen lived two hours from the prison. "I almost always drove home alone after an execution. Sleep was out of the question... During this time, I wrestled with myself. Is the world a safer, more just place because of what has taken place tonight?"