Edward Earl Johnson, Quintin Jones and Fourteen Days in May: the lasting legacy of the secrecy of capital punishment.

Film holds a mirror up to society and forces us to look at every imperfection that we choose to ignore from day to day. While sat inside our comfort, it is easy and sometimes rewarding to turn a blind eye to the overwhelming mass of atrocities taking place around us. Switching on the news at night feels like asking for a weight as strong as the world itself to press us back down into feeling numb with apathy as people the majority of the population have not spoken one word to make decisions for our human rights.

With a growing curiosity about the way we translate real life to the screen, I stumbled across Paul Hamann’s 1987 documentary Fourteen Days in May, which charted the process on the lead up to the execution of Edward Earl Johnson. Johnson was tried and convicted for the murder of a policeman and the sexual assault of a 69-year-old woman. He spent eight years on death row, a slim season compared to the decades most people endure before execution in the present day, where he maintained his innocence. Represented by British attorney Clive Stafford Smith, Fourteen Days in May shows the personal and legal battle to prevent his execution with the eerie backdrop of Parchman Prison Farm in Mississippi. He is still, to this day, the youngest person…