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The death penalty is “a losing situation for everybody,” actress and Clemency star Alfre Woodard said in a recent Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists internet forum. “It does not bring back the person who has been taken violently. It doesn’t. It destroys lives.”
Woodard joined writer, activist, and Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Patrisse Cullors in a July 29, 2020 SAG-AFTRA Foundation discussion of the Woodard’s 2019 film Clemency and, as Cullors describes it, related events “in the real world.” Clemency explores the psychological toll of the death penalty through the eyes of prison warden Bernadine Williams (portrayed by Woodard in a critically acclaimed performance) as she prepares to oversee her 12th execution in the aftermath of a botched execution. The film, directed by Chinonye Chukwu, was inspired by the controversial 2011 execution of Troy Davis in Georgia. Clemency also calls attention to issues of conditions on death row and race.
Woodard argues that focusing public attention on both the death penalty and racial justice is necessary for progress to be made on those interwoven issues. Asked about the surge of Hollywood activism on racial justice issues, Woodard explicitly linked the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer to killings authorized by the U.S. legal system. “It took a death penalty being carried out without a trial on an innocent man in front of us,” she said. “We watched it for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. It took that to blow open people’s minds to the point that they’d say what can I do?”
Cullors has repeatedly called for the abolition of the death penalty as one of the principle tenets of the Black Lives Matters’ movement for racial justice. “I think we need to get rid of the death penalty all together without any conditions,” Cullors said. “No human being should be taking anybody else’s life.” In addition to harming individual Black defendants, she said, capital punishment harms Black communities as a whole. Given what BLM sees as the pervasive racial injustice in the American legal system and the death penalty’s role in legitimizing official violence against Black Americans, Cullors sees complete abolition as the only remedy for the racially unequal use of capital punishment across the country.
Long-running execution lawsuits have settled in Arizona and California, as a renewed challenge to the state’s revised lethal-injection protocol has ramped up in Oklahoma.
The Arizona settlement addressed issues of execution transparency, while the California settlement acknowledged the impact of the state’s execution moratorium and preserved death-row prisoners’ rights to oppose any new execution plan should the moratorium be lifted. The Oklahoma litigation raises concerns about the constitutionality of the state’s latest execution protocol and whether it complies with the terms of a prior court settlement.
