A human face to the death penalty
Mary Fitzgerald
Don Cabana: former warden at the Mississippi State Penitentiary
According to Dostoyevsky, we can judge a society on how it treats its prisoners. If so, a new exhibition by the artist Claire Phillips, which opened at the Oxo Gallery on London’s Southbank last night, provides a bleak assessment of the condition of the most advanced nation in the world.
The aim of the project, supported by the charity Reprieve, is unambiguous: it wants to show us how crude, inhumane and unjust the ongoing use of the dealth penalty in America is. Yet the artist, who travelled to Miami, Atlanta and Mississippi, chose a wide range of subjects whose relationship with death row vary enormously. There are, as to be expected, current inmates (some who have already been executed) and their family members, as well as former inmates exonerated after long periods of incarceration. But there’s also an executioner responsible for four executions; the foreperson of a jury that convicted and sentenced to death a man who was later proved innocent; and a congressman who voted to reinstate the death penalty in the 1970s and then subsequently pioneered the use of the lethal injection method. This lends the experience an unusual texture and nuance.
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