Capital Punishment and the Arts: Clemency Lead Actress and Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Discuss Justice and the Death Penalty

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 12^th 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.

In response to an audi­ence ques­tion on how peo­ple can have an impact on death-penal­ty pol­i­cy, Cullors empha­sized the impor­tance of local elect­ed offi­cials. ​“One way you can do that is look­ing at who is your local dis­trict attor­ney,” she said. ​“At the end of the day, your dis­trict attor­ney has the pow­er to decide who gets the death penal­ty. … California has some of the high­est num­bers of peo­ple on death row. More num­bers in some places than the South. I think it mat­ters who is in office and that’s one of the first places you can look into. Then you can work with folks who are work­ing on the death penal­ty and try­ing to get rid of it.”

Cullors high­light­ed the upcom­ing November elec­tion in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s race. ​“In our coun­ty, … many of you have heard about Jackie Lacey,” Cullors said. ​“She still issues the death penal­ty.” A 2019 study by the ACLU report­ed that under Lacey’s admin­is­tra­tion, the death penal­ty had been imposed 22 times, exclu­sive­ly against defen­dants of col­or, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly for killings involv­ing white vic­tims, and dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly in cas­es han­dled by the worst defense lawyers. 

Cullors also expressed her oppo­si­tion to life with­out parole as an alter­na­tive of the death penal­ty. ​“Life with­out parole,” she said, ​“is the death penal­ty under a different name. “

Both Woodard and Cullors assert that abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty is a nec­es­sary step towards crim­i­nal legal reform and racial heal­ing. Capital pun­ish­ment, they said, is emblem­at­ic of an inef­fec­tive legal sys­tem that does not achieve what it claims to aspire to — justice.