What if you only had seven days to live; how would you spend your last hours? What if you were confined to a seven-foot by ten-foot cell with nothing to do but count the cracks in the gray walls – How would you spend those days?
“Everyone dies,” said internationally acclaimed director Steven Scaffidi, “but we don’t want to know ahead of time how, when and where it’s going to happen.”
The Knight Law Center presented the new docudrama “Execution” on Thursday Nov. 8, which followed with a discussion featuring former Georgia death row inmate William Neal “Billy” Moore and Scaffidi. The movie documents the last seven days of a death row inmate’s life. “Execution” is not an ordinary drama film, however; the main character is actually played by Moore, who spent 16 years on death row and now through film portrays the death he nearly faced.
Scaffidi, who has collaborated with the filmmakers of Tim Robbins’ “Dead Man Walking,” was denied the right to film a real execution, so he decided to make his own realistic account.
“This film takes the viewer closer to the execution process than any other film,” Scaffidi said, expressing his deep fascination with the issue. “My goal is to put you on the front row and let you decide for yourself.
“Very few people know anything about it. I don’t know how many here have witnessed an execution, but you’re about to tonight.”
“There’s more to it than just strapping somebody to the chair and flipping the switch,” said Donald Cabana, the former director of Mississippi State Penitentiary, who appears in the film as a prison warden.
In the film he explains the process of shaving the inmate’s head and placing a plug into the inmate’s rectum. “Without that diaper, it can be one hell of a mess,” Cabana said, continuing “at 11:30 p.m., we walk the mile…until then, they aren’t alive or dead.”
After being led from one creaking door to the next, the prisoner is tightly fastened to the electric chair and is allowed a brief last word. At 12:01 a.m., a hood is placed over the convict’s head, and you can smell “cooked meat” as the condemned’s flesh burns. “The liver is too hot to be touched by a human hand during the autopsy,” explained Cabana.
In some sense, Moore’s real life was more like a movie than the film itself. During the last seven hours before his execution, the courts decided to commute his sentence to life, making him one of the only Americans to escape death row. The night the film aired at the University, marked the 16th anniversary of Moore’s release.
“It is strange in the sense that here I am looking at myself on my anniversary, watching what could have happened,” he said.
One year after his prison sentence was commuted, Moore was released. Now, his life and freedom are both owed completely to the family of the victim he murdered. Moore said that the Christian family, who lobbied rigorously for his release and influenced Moore’s religious conversion, told the court, “He is our brother, and you can’t kill him.”
Critics consider “Execution” unprecedented for its tough realism, refraining from a direct apology or convenient ending.
Cree Ingles, a community member, said being in the same room with Moore was difficult.
“I was very angry when I first saw him because I kept it in my heart that he had killed someone,” she said. “I think they could feel the glares I was shooting up there. I was wondering whether I could do this without blurting out something rude.
“I am actually very happy I came, though,” she said. “There is more than one side to the issue and I want to be able to see what’s inside.”