So many inmates are executed in Texas -- 320 since 1976 --it's become a rote, mechanized assembly line procedure.

Texas has performed more than one-third of all the executions carried out in the United States in the last 28 years, and the state's execution chamber, a small, brick-walled room painted hospital green, is by far the nation's busiest. Last year, an average of two condemned inmates each month were strapped onto the stainless steel gurney, covered with a white sheet and briskly injected with three lethal drugs. So far this year, the pace is even faster.

They may not agree on much else, but prosecutors and defense attorneys, death penalty supporters and opponents and even the inmates and their guards concur on this: Texas has evolved an exceedingly efficient bureaucracy for putting people to death.

Here's what one guard had to say:

"Yes, it does get automated, because we do it so much," said Jim Willett, the former warden at the 19th Century Walls prison--where the execution chamber is located--who oversaw nearly 90 executions before his retirement in 2001. "But I don't know that I don't feel sorry for the guy working some other place that does three a year. Because if I do one here and I feel really bad about it--something about the guy or his crime, he's young or whatever--it ain't gonna be long till another one comes along. "It's kinda like baseball," Willett concluded. "You have a bad game today, another day or two you're gonna be playing another game."

Texas maintains a comprehensive death row website, which until only recently, included the last meals ordered by the prisoners.