14 days in May 33 years on...

In my extreme lockdown boredom I've been wading through all the BBC's old documentaries on iplayer.  And I came across "14 Days in May".  The film about the execution of Edward Earl Johnson made 33 years ago.  I remembered watching it at the time.  It's got more depressing with more time...

This is Dickens on public executions ...

"The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it, faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks and language, of the assembled spectators. ... When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgment, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and there were no belief among men but that they perished like beasts.”

Of course we're too civilised for that these days so now we have the Death Row documentary where we are allowed to watch the psycological torture of souls to the very second before the plunger.... 

14 Days in May was one of the very first of these and it has the benefit of innocence and is far less knowing.  What's most memorable about it is that Edward Earl Johnson almost certainly didn't do it.  He was executed on the basis of a confession and the main witness denied it was him.  Worse after he was killed someone turned up to say they knew he couldn't have done it. 

The film starts with the boss of the penitentiary telling his minions that they shouldn't make any bad taste remarks or he will sack them.  You wonder what he's getting out of having the film crew there.  He seems to believe Johnson did it.  Almost everyone else believes he didn't.  Rabbits are used to test the gas chamber and undergo horrible rapid convulsions.  Black prisoners are shown doing work on farmland.  "They call it the farm but it's just a different name for plantation," says one inmate or words to that effect.  It's all very scarey and worse you feel that it could have happened yesterday rather than 33 years ago.

A memorable interviewee is Clive Stafford Smith - Johnson's attorney.  Full of enthusiasm he clearly believes right up to the last moment that he'll get Johnson a stay - it was not to be.

There's an interview with him on the Reprieve website copied from the TLS on the 18th of June this month.  In it he says:

"I hold myself responsible for Edward’s death. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to think about it. Paul Hamann filmed the two weeks running up to this catastrophic finale for his film, Fourteen Days in May (1987), so I have the dubious luxury of being able to replay the grandest failure of my life whenever I want.It was long after midnight and I had come from breaking the news to Edward’s family that he was dead. Now it was my chance to vent to the media.

“What was I meant to tell them?” I demanded of the journalists assembled before me, in their pecking order, from the TV crews with their tripods, down to the newspaper journalists sprawled on the cheap nylon carpet. “It’s a sick world. It’s a sick world.”

Worse still...

"It was a traumatic affair for everyone, all the more so for me when I talked to his friend Big Mary. She told me that Edward could not have done the crime, as she had been with him at the time.

“Why didn’t you tell someone that?” I blurted out.

“I did”, she replied. “I went to the po-lice and they told me to go home and mind my own business.”"

The rest of the interview is here.