Former executioner Jerry Givens now death penalty foe Former executioner Jerry Givens says he became an opponent of the death penalty after he was convicted of a crime he says he didn't commit. AS STATE executioner in Virginia, Jerry Givens put to death 62 people, but he says after being falsely convicted himself he has had a change of heart. The 60-year-old African-American worked as a correctional officer in the southern US state between 1974 and 1999 when he was charged with money laundering and perjury and was forced to resign. "In 17 of those 25 years I executed 62 people, I executed 37 by electrocution and 25 by lethal injection," he said on the sidelines of the four-day World Congress against the Death Penalty which got underway in Madrid on Wednesday. "It was like a rollercoaster, up and down, because as a correctional officer I prepared inmates to return into society as a productive citizen and as an executioner you take lives," added Givens, who worked first at Virginia State Penitentiary and then Greenville Correctional Centre. As the state executioner he would shave the head of convicts facing the death penalty and then strap them into Virginia's electric chair or inject them with a lethal mix of drugs. "We put a cap over your head and send in 3000 volts to your body, that is gross," said Givens. The white-bearded Givens said he would meet with convicts 15 days before they were to face the death penalty. "I talked to them to make sure that they were ready," he said. Givens said that at the time that he worked as an executioner he felt "that person does not deserve to live." I didn't take full responsibility of this guy being there, I shifted back to the judge, the jury, the family members and himself. I didn't take the whole burden on myself. His view of the death penalty changed in 1999 when authorities accused him of buying a car with a friend with funds that he knew came from drug dealing and charged him with money laundering and perjury. Givens, who maintains his innocence, was convicted and spent four years in jail. Then I asked myself: were some of these 62 people treated unfairly like me? I don't know that, but there is a possibility. Were any of them innocent?" he said. "In my country you are subject to have an unfair trial if you don't have a lot of money," he added at a press conference at the congress, organised by the French lobby group Ensemble Contre La Peine de Mort (Together Against the Death Penalty). About 1500 people from 90 countries - including high-profile politicians such as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, former death row inmates, human rights activists and family members of people facing execution - are expected to gather for the congress, the fifth of its kind. Tanya Ibar, whose husband Pablo Ibar, a 40-year-old Spaniard, was arrested in Florida in 1994 for triple murder and condemned to death six years later, told the gathering that Givens "realises now what he did was a huge mistake." She said her dream is to be able to hug her husband "without a guard or somebody telling me that I can't, that I have to stop." "The thought that somebody could murder my husband is something unspeakable," she said. Visiting death row I see lot of men there who committed horrible crimes, but what a lot of people don't realise is that that man himself was probably a victim before he made somebody else a victim, he was probably mistreated as a child. Souad El Khammal, president of a victims' association founded after the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca, told the gathering she fights against the death penalty even though she lost her husband and son in the attacks which left 45 people dead, including the 12 bombers. "At the time of the attack, if I had the possibility to kill the people who took the life of my husband and son, who destroyed my life, I would have killed them with my own hands," she said. "But after a few years I returned to myself, to my principles," she said, adding that both she and her husband had opposed the death penalty before the attack.