Dignity and the Drama of the Death Penalty 1

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the law and personhood, dispossession and dignity. It asks: How might we move beyond a conception of dignity as the bounded property of the liberal, autonomous agent, toward a more capacious understanding of dignity, as the affective relationality between persons? How does the negative force of the death penalty radiate beyond the condemned and exert its power over their loved ones, family, and even the staff of the prison? What might it mean lose one’s autonomy, a word that derives from the law (nomos) over the self (autos), in the face of the state’s management of life and death? Exploring the moral and legal staging of the death penalty in Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency (2019) and Boo Junfeng’s Apprentice (2016) this article examines conceptions of personhood when “civility” meets capital punishment.

Chinonye Chukwu’s intense, spare, and understated film, Clemency, (2019) approaches the drama of the death penalty obliquely, through the eyes of the prison warden Bernadine Williams who oversees executions. The film traces the toll capital punishment takes on a warden in a maximum-security prison. The warden, who controls many incarcerated bodies, begins to lose control of herself. Navigating her role as state functionary, while also inhabiting her identity as a Black woman, produces frictions between her persona and her person. Clemency dramatizes her moral vacillation, her commitment to her professionalism on the one hand, and on the other, the psychic enervation and depletion produced by the contradictory demands of her job. The film captures how the professional mask of the warden abrades against the skin of the Black woman.

This scenario of moral vacillation probes the relationship between the law, personhood, and dignity. If, as liberal political theory reminds us, individuals have property in their own persons, and self-possession is a prerequisite to the autonomous subject, what might it mean for Bernadine Williams to lose ownership of herself? How does the warden of countless incarcerated men and women grapple with her loss of self-possession? How does Bernadine’s increasing automaticity replace her autonomy, a word that derives from the law (nomos) over the self (autos)? How does she manage psychic distress by fleeing the self? Locating this drama within a maximum-security prison allows us to consider the relationship between the law and personhood, dignity and dispossession.

What conceptions of legal personhood are animated in these scenes that hover between personhood, dignity, and dispossession? Personhood is a legal artifice, which has historically differentiated between rights-bearing persons and enslaved humans who were deemed property of their owners. The debates around the abolition of the death penalty converge on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” Consider, for instance, the changing settings of capital punishment from firing squads and electric chairs to lethal injections that attempt to introduce more humane means of killing life. To appear less barbaric, the state moved from public hangings and electric chairs to lethal injections, which in turn appears to “euthanize” prisoners and position them as animals. At the threshold of execution, carceral state rituals like offering a final meal of their choice and allowing a few last public words before execution provide a façade of civility, and even dignity. ² Clemency repeatedly evokes the uncanny encounter between prisoner and gurney, between person and thing, to probe conceptions of agency. The film portrays the multiple ironies of appearing civil and humane, while taking human life.

While most other Western industrialized nations have abolished the death penalty, the United States still retains it. ³ Some scholars believe that the death penalty may be nearing its demise, and that “there are indications that the end game for the death penalty in the United States has begun.” ⁴ Critics of the death penalty have emphasized the entrenched racial disparities within the death penalty system: Black and Latinx people represent 31% of the U.S. population, but 53% of death row inmates—41.9% and 11.3%, respectively. This larger social and legal context is helpful to keep in mind as we consider Clemency’s artistic interventions within these political debates surrounding the death penalty.

If Clemency dramatizes the increasing withdrawal of Bernadine Williams from her own sense of self and agency, Singaporean film-maker Boo Junfeng’s Apprentice (2016) offers a close look at how the son of an executed man steps into the role of the executioner. Apprentice delves deep into the psychic distortions that capital punishment generates within family members who survive the execution of a loved one. Together, these films trouble prevailing depictions in mainstream cinema that locate redemption in the avowal of individualized criminal responsibility. By shifting the focus onto the executioners, the films explore the radiating psychic harms of capital punishment beyond those who are executed. These films raise moral and ethical questions about the relationship between punishment and personhood, between State power and vulnerability, between dignity and deterrence.

While the purpose of punishment may be retributive or utilitarian, rehabilitative or symbolic, it also inaugurates a particular kind of moral subject at the heart of its sanction. Unlike utilitarian justifications for punishment as deterrence, for retributivists punishment effects a proportional compensation that is adequate to the criminal conduct. It should not serve any other instrumental purpose. Kant is emphatic on this point, “Punishment by a court . . . can never be inflicted merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society.” ⁵ For Kant, punishment avows one’s autonomy and eschews rigorously any instrumental intent, “A man can never be treated merely as a means to the purposes of another or be put among the objects of rights to things: His innate personality protects him from this, even though he can be condemned to lose his civil personality.” ⁶ An act of crime disturbs public harmony; it can only be redressed by punishment, which redistributes benefits and harms, restores just equilibrium, and reinstates social equilibrium.

Dismissing the paternalism of utilitarian theories, retributivists acknowledge the importance of treating defendants as autonomous, rational actors, who must take full responsibility for their actions. The question of responsibility is central to the retributivists’ conception of punishment: in punishing the criminal conduct, retributivists acknowledge that the defendant was a rational, responsible, agential, and autonomous actor. For Kant, retributive punishment affirms, rather than denies, the dignity of the defendant. Repaying the debt they owe society through submitting readily to punishment, restores their dignity. ⁷ In contrast to contemporary discourses of dignity in human rights movements that claim that certain punishments affront the dignity of the condemned, Kantian retributivism suggests that punishment avows their dignity.

For Kant, “wurde,” the German word for dignity draws etymologically from “wert” for worthy or valuable; that which is beyond equivalence or above a price or is invaluable acquires dignity. Dignity, in Kant’s conception, is grounded in autonomy, it is the capacity for individuals to self-govern, resist their impulses, and follow self-given moral laws. It is egalitarian, an end in itself, raised above all price, and approaches the sublime. One reveres dignity in those who are governed by an inner moral law. In the Kantian discourse of dignity, the person is imagined as bounded, insular, and autonomous—the dignified actor must take responsibility and pay recompense for their act. A person’s responsibility for their own actions constitutes their dignitas, or the special status of being human.

Etymologically, dignity derives from the Latin “dignus” or worth. It connoted high social status and suggests the way in which someone of high position ought to be treated. A central concept in human rights discourse, dignity has a second meaning that suggests an unearned or intrinsic quality that inheres in all humans. The concept of dignity is enshrined in human rights discourse: the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) declares, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” It is also pivotal to important international conventions such as Grundgesetz (Basic Law) of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949), which avers, “Human dignity is inviolable.” Article 3 of the Geneva Convention states that signatories may not treat prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating: “Committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Yet, discourses of dignity, and by extension, humanity, enable what Derrida calls, an “anesthesial logic” to emerge in the death penalty, which attends to methods of execution, while ignoring its philosophical premise. Derrida uncovers the fiduciary underpinnings, the economic and psychic surplus value, underlying both the abolitionists and retributivists arguments against and for the death penalty. Abolitionist discourse invokes the pure principle of human dignity over any other value. Kant argues for disinterestedness in punishment and advocates a principle of pure equivalence. Yet, Derrida asks, is this claim really disinterested? He points out that the idea of moral compensation derives from equivalence in credit, thus exposing the primitive interest that hovers over claims of moral compensation. ⁸ Derrida emphasizes the commercial interest that lurks in Kantian “categorical imperative,” which confounds purist and moral discourses of jus talionis or law of retaliation in criminal justice.

Nigerian American filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu’s film Clemency allows us to see competing notions of personhood and dignity circulating through the film. Chukwu tells the story from the perspective of a maximum-security prison warden. In the film, Alfre Woodard plays the role of Bernadine Williams with a disquieting dignity and electric intensity that reveals the soul weariness, attrition, and loss of morale that she suffers because of her job. Williams’s obstinate attachment to her career gives her a sense of her professional identity. “I am the warden,” she avers. “I do a damn good job. I do a goddamn good job.” Yet her profession, which includes executing those on death row, takes an enormous toll on her sense of well-being. She is described as an “empty shell” by her husband, who encourages her to resign from her position. Playing on her role as death-dealer who administers executions until the pulse flatlines, her husband insists to her, “I need a pulse, Bernadine. I need to know that you’re still here, that I’m still here.” ⁹ The carapace that holds the seemingly robotic Bernadine suggests that she may already be a marionette. Her incapacity to respond with warmth is vivid not only in her scenes with her intimate partner but also when Anthony Woods’s mother reaches out to her for comfort. Bernadine freezes – her role as state appointed executioner thwarts her ability to respond with any humanity to a mother whose son she is obligated to kill. Bernadine hardens herself but, in the process, she simultaneously witnesses her own body turn against her. Her co-workers are also unsure if Bernadine is all there. Bernadine goes through the motions automatically, as if simultaneously programmed and resigned.

The film reinforces the notion that Bernadine may be slipping away—that her profession encroaches on her humanity, triggering a retreat from her own body. Her anxiety takes on somatic and embodied dimensions: In the flickering light of the television screen, she watches late night shows on depression. She grows sexually estranged from her husband, drinks to cope with the quiet horror of her job, and suffers from insomnia. When she does sleep, it is fitful, and she is besieged by nightmares where roles are reversed, and the defendant straps her onto the gurney. She awakens in a cold sweat, attempting to regain an elusive sense of control, “I’m OK. I’m OK,” she mutters, while also fretting, “I can’t sleep. I can’t go to sleep.” Despite her protestations that she is okay, the film repeatedly depicts a character who is coming undone.

The film starts with the botched execution of Jimenez and ends with the execution of Woods, whose culpability remains shrouded in doubt. Both cases offer vivid arguments against the death penalty. Bernadine dissociates from both scenes of executions when they occur. Indeed, this recurrent dissociation seems like a psychic strategy of survival. She momentarily renounces her own body so she does not have to bear witness to the proceedings of the execution. Following the execution of Woods, we hear the officer address her, “Warden, Warden, Warden. . .Bernadine,” he calls out, and she snaps out of her trance. We hear his insistent voice, “Are you here, Bernadine? Are you here?” Bernadine is only barely present, and she walks away from the scene of the execution, down the aisle, in a wobbly daze.

The sonic surround sets the mood for the opening scene in the film. We are cued into the abyss of institutional emptiness by the eerily echoing, clicking sound of the warden’s high heels as she walks down a dark aisle, framed by rows of small windows of prison cells. As the image materializes, we see her back framed by the narrow aisle, entering through a gate that closes behind her, incarcerating her within the filmic frame. She is gazing at an empty, upright gurney, as the death-dealing, spectral object seems to confront her. The scene captures this frozen tableau between person and thing. The object exudes power over the subject, transfixes her, literally petrifying her. Again, one of her officers calls out to her, “Warden, warden.” “Bernadine,” he cries out in exasperation, and she awakens from the spell. The film stages the growing incongruity between Bernadine and the warden, face and mask, person and persona.

The crisis in Bernadine Williams’s professional identity is precipitated by a botched execution. The twelfth execution she presides over does not go as seamlessly as planned. Death by lethal injection, in this case, proves challenging as the medical orderly tries repeatedly to find a usable vein. A top-down shot frames the terror on the face of Jimenez, held in place on the gurney by the officers, just seconds before he is executed. “Can I get you anything?” the warden asks Jimenez solicitously, in a convention designed to confer some dignity to a defendant just minutes away from his death. The medical orderly hovers over Jimenez, tries repeatedly to find a vein, and finally injects him in the groin. The soundscape floods the scene, harmonizing the prisoner’s mumbling prayer with the Chaplain’s biblical recitation. Just as the spectacle of dying unfolds in front of an audience across the death chamber, the needle snaps, the prisoner cries out in agony, and the smooth machinery of state-sanctioned killing is interrupted. ¹⁰ The writhing body on display reveals the operations of biopolitical government. Framed as “bare life,” the exposed body hovers between person and thing, easily evacuated of any lingering traces of personhood. The reduction of person to thing is made vivid as the vulnerable body on the gurney is deprived of agency and made to submit to the power of the state. As blood spurts out and the prisoner writhes in agony, the antiseptic facade of efficient state killing begins to disintegrate.

Clemency unfolds as the audience awaits the thirteenth execution—that of Anthony Woods—a prisoner on death row awaiting news from the governor regarding his petition for clemency. The final scene replicates the opening one. Again, the ticking of the clock, the clicking of the heels, and the soundscape cues us in to the daily ledger of hopes and disappointments that parcel out and calibrate the final moments before another state-sanctioned killing. The film builds anticipation that perhaps Woods may receive a pardon and be set free. The entire film is structured around this waiting, up until he is escorted to the death chamber. Anthony’s culpability is mired in uncertainty. The evidence is dubious, a clemency plea is in process. Add to that, his final words of disavowal. Woods is offered a chance to speak his final words to the witnesses across the glass window of the death chamber. He addresses the Collins family and unequivocally declares his innocence: “I did not shoot your family member,” he avows. The sonic surround floods out the sound of the dying heartbeat as the camera zooms in tightly on the warden’s face. But just as the lethal injection begins pumping poison into his body, Bernadine’s carefully crafted composure comes undone. The scene of execution prompts her to question her complicity in participating in the execution of the death penalty. Indeed, it shakes her faith in the legitimacy of capital punishment itself.

The film traces the subtle transformation in Bernadine Williams. As a strategy of psychic survival, she disconnects from her role as agent of state-sanctioned killing. Her inability to respond to calls of “warden” makes clear her growing estrangement from her professional role that facilitates state-sanctioned killing. Chukwu turns her lens on the small players of capital punishment and explores the psychic toll the death penalty exerts on the bit players in the state machinery of capital punishment. The film makes clear that even though she facilitates the death penalty, Bernadine Williams dissociates from her role as state sanctioned killer.

Clemency traces the banality of Williams’s complicity, as she continues to face recrimination from a range of people implicated in the criminal legal system, from the defense counsel to the victim’s family. She finds recourse in managerial discourses of professionalism, while skirting larger questions of responsibility. She is merely a functionary of the State, yet she is haunted by the role she plays in the executions of those in her ward. Even as Bernadine shuttles between her roles as person and mask, she confers a sense of dignity and personhood to prisoners at the brink of death. As she retorts to Marty, the defense attorney for Woods, “I do my job. You want to believe there’s good guys and bad guys. And I am one of the bad guys. But I give these men respect, Marty. All the way through.”

Chukwu marshals the conception of dignity in these scenes to expose how humanizing discourses are mobilized to diminish and downplay the horror of capital punishment. These practices of civility attempt to throw a veneer of humanity onto an uncivilized, indeed barbaric, practice of killing human life. “I have treated him like a human being. Every step of the way,” Bernadine avers to Marty. And she does. She is civil and courteous to the men on death row. Just as she politely asks Jimenez, strapped to the gurney, if he needs anything, she is respectful and polite to Woods. She follows conventions that paper over the cruelty of capital punishment and confer a sense of civility: she offers him his choice of final meal. “The last meal is your choice. Anything. Anything you want. Just ask. Like seafood, halal, vegan. A lot of guys want steak and lobster. But it’s your choice. You get to choose.” Williams seems determined to bestow a sense of dignity to those whose very humanity seems to be eclipsed in their final moments before their death. ¹¹ And yet, the absurdity of her investment in propriety in the context where she will execute these men is not lost on her.

Navigating her role as the petty state sovereign, while also inhabiting her identity as a Black woman produces frictions between person and persona. The film explores the widening rift between the warden and Bernadine, the professional and the personal, the persona and the person. As a state functionary, she is a go-between, with limited agency, whose “professionalism” consists in never letting her mask slip. Clemency stages how the protagonist begins to lose her sense of self-possession. If liberty is tied to a sense of self-mastery and self-possession, the warden who monitors the carceral space loses her own sense of liberty.

Clemency draws on Jen Marlowe’s book, I am Troy Davis, a compelling account that explores the real-life case of Troy Davis, a Black man, who was executed in Georgia on September 21, 2011. Davis was convicted of shooting to death a white police officer, Mark MacPhail, on August 19, 1989, in Savannah, Georgia. ¹² He was sentenced to death in August 1991. Davis maintained his innocence up until his execution, and the inconclusive evidence spurred lingering doubts about his innocence. The case elicited an international outcry against capital punishment. In the twenty-two years between his conviction and execution, Davis and his defenders secured wide-ranging public support, but he was ultimately denied clemency. After a last-minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied, Davis was executed. ¹³ Several scholars and activists argued that the repeated deferral of the date of execution itself constituted a form of “cruel and unusual punishment.” ¹⁴

Jen Marlowe’s I am Troy Davis, written with support from Troy Davis’s sister, Martina Davis-Correia, underlines the inconsistencies that cast doubt on the conviction: the unreliable and recanted eyewitness testimony, the lies and snitching, the pressure and intimidation that the witnesses felt—point not to the guilt of a man on death row, but to a corrupt and broken criminal legal system. Yet, the power of the book lies in its ability to capture the far-reaching consequences of the execution of Troy Davis. It fleshes out the psychic and physical toll of capital punishment, radiating its death-dealing negativity beyond the one on death row, and infiltrating family, friends, supporters, prison personnel, and beyond. The book focuses on the courage of Martina Davis-Correia, the almost-twin sister of Troy Davis, who fought against the state, much like the classical Greek heroine, Antigone, fought for her dead brother to receive a dignified burial. The book exemplifies the relational social ties that elude and exceed autonomous conceptions of legal personhood.

I am Troy Davis makes vivid that the execution ultimately took not only the life of Troy Davis, it also took the lives of his loved ones. The book elaborates the many lives that were impacted by the death sentence. “I would rather die than bury a child I love,” his father, Joseph Davis, said to Troy on what was his final visit, shortly before Troy was moved to death row. Soon after, his father stopped eating and taking his insulin. He went into diabetic shock, followed by a diabetic coma. ¹⁵ The warden had refused the family’s request to let Troy Davis talk to his father before he passed away. Shortly after Troy Davis was on death row, his mother died, inexplicably. Her daughter recalls hearing her mother whisper in her nightly prayers, “please don’t let them kill my child.” ¹⁶ Ultimately, the stress and heartache drained her of her very life, and she died while awaiting news about her son. Some part of Martina Davis-Correa, too, died on the day her brother was executed. She stayed beside him, in spirit, if not in person, on Georgia’s death row. So, it came as no surprise when she succumbed to cancer only two months after his execution. Killing Troy Davis, in effect, killed his family, too.

The impact of Davis’s execution radiated beyond his immediate family, again making vivid the relationality rather than the autonomy of personhood. “I am Troy Davis” was not only the rallying cry of activists across the world demanding the abolition of the death penalty, it also conveys how traces of our loved ones continue to linger in us long after they are gone. ¹⁷ It points to the enduring ways in which the presence of Troy Davis persists in his family, and most notably molds his nephew, De’Jaun Davis-Correia. ¹⁸ At his final parole hearing, De’Jaun made a powerful, if unheeded, appeal for Troy’s life:

It’s hard for me to imagine what life would be like without Uncle Troy. Losing him would mean losing my father, my teacher, my mentor—and my best friend. I love him so much. His death would devastate me. It would devastate my family. . . On behalf of myself and my family, I ask you—I beg you—please spare the life of my uncle, Troy Anthony Davis. ¹⁹

The death penalty exacts a price on more than one individual—it unleashes a quiet, less spectacular, slow death on those loved ones who survive the state sanctioned killing.

In the preface to the book, Sister Helen Prejean writes, “In my thirty years of working on death’s threshold I have seen firsthand how the families of murder victims suffer during the drawn-out appeals process. This may be the quietest, most pernicious legacy of the death penalty: the irreparable harm it inflicts on families, a pain made all the more unjust by its arbitrary application.” ²⁰ These executions demonstrate how death penalty exceeds the killing of one individual, putting into crisis the very conception of the bounded, autonomous agential subject of liberal political theory. Capital punishment also damages family and loved ones, in addition to prison personnel.

I am Troy Davis gestures toward the toll the death penalty exacts on personnel within maximum security prisons. Marlowe and Davis-Correia share a document written and signed by prison wardens that may have been one source of inspiration for Chukwu’s film. In it, the wardens write:

We write to you as former wardens and corrections officials who have had direct involvement in executions. Like few others in this country, we understand that you have a job to do in carrying out the lawful orders of the judiciary. We also understand, from our own personal experiences, the awful lifelong repercussions that come from participating in the execution of prisoners. While most of the prisoners whose executions we participated in accepted responsibility for the crimes for which they were punished, some of us have also executed prisoners who maintained their innocence until the end. It is those cases that are most haunting to an executioner. . .Living with the nightmares is something that we know from experience. No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt. Should our justice system be causing so much harm to so many people when there is an alternative? We urge you to ask the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reconsider their decision. ²¹

The wardens here speak of being haunted, of recurrent nightmares, and the psychic toll that their professional participation in the death penalty demands of them. The particular ethical conundrum experienced by the wardens of death row prisoners resonates with long-held views and anxieties expressed about the role of the executioner. Beccaria’s powerful treatise, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into English as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1767) catalyzed penal reform and offered a powerful utilitarian argument against capital punishment. Writing as far back as 1764, Cesaire Beccaria, the 26-year-old Italian jurist, philosopher, and author highlights the scorn directed at executioners:

. . .the acts of indignation and contempt with which everyone regards the hangman, who is, after all, merely the innocent executor of the public will, a good citizen contributing to the public good, an instrument as necessary to the internal security of a people as valorous soldiers are to the external. ²²

Clemency exposes how humanizing discourses of dignity thwart engaging with the cruelty of the death penalty. The questions of dignity and dispossession are at the heart of this film: the killing state has total power over the bodies of those incarcerated. The film exposes the acute indignities and vulnerability when bodies of Black and brown men are made to submit to state power. Given that the bodies on display are those of men of color, the film suggests how the death penalty serves as a tool of racialized control. No longer in possession of their own bodies, these prisoners suffer under the domination of an absolute sovereign power. They are forced into chambers where the state acts upon their exposed bodies, and they succumb in scenes of unremitting vulnerability. Yet within these scenes, we see how the keepers of the state also lose their humanity and their personhood. If personhood is tied to a notion of liberty, to a conception of self-possession, of having property in your own self, Bernadine’s increasing automaticity, her evacuation of her selfhood, because of the demands of her job, reveals that despite her physical freedom, she, too, is incarcerated and unfree. Coerced into being an agent of state cruelty, Bernadine simply evacuates her own personhood.

Mainstream cinema has often perpetuated, rather than critiqued, Kantian conceptions around individualized criminal responsibility. Such cinema circulates prevailing images of the redemption that ensues from accepting responsibility for one’s criminal acts. While decrying the brutality of the death penalty, these films nevertheless blame the individual criminal actor rather than the structural forces that generate the conditions that produce crime. Austin Sarat argues in his probing analysis that death penalty cinema often holds responsible individual criminal offenders in ways that refute “broad narratives of responsibility that would implicate us all in the circumstances that produce crime and would undermine the moral and legal scaffolding on which the apparatus of punishment is built.” ²³ Similarly, Daniel LaChance identifies two anxieties in cinema that depicts capital punishment, “one rooted in doubts about the humaneness of capital punishment, the other rooted in doubts about the foundations of a culture of responsibility—surfaced, at times, in death penalty films of the modern era.” ²⁴ This dominant approach in mainstream cinema bemoans the harshness of death penalty, while sentimentalizing the redemption that follows accepting one’s criminal responsibility. Playing out a Kantian logic, these films avow that accepting one’s responsibility for a criminal act becomes the way to redeem one’s dignity. Such a conception of individual responsibility simultaneously obfuscates the structural disadvantages that many individuals within marginalized communities contend with, limiting their possibilities and constraining their choices.

Clemency challenges such sentimentalism by looking squarely at the State’s role in perpetuating cycles of cruelty. By focusing on the executioner, the film makes vivid that killing, even when enacted by a state agent, is ultimately a highly personal act. ²⁵ Even though she is a functionary of the state, Bernadine is unable to find comfort in abstract discourses of civility and retributive punishment. It is her role as a killer that torments her. The intimacy of this act of killing implicates Bernadine in ways that she cannot reconcile with her moral subjectivity.

If Clemency explores the impact on the executioner of killing someone who may be innocent, Boo Junfeng’s film, Apprentice (2016) sharpens the critique of capital punishment. The warden in Apprentice is the son of a self-confessed murderer. Despite the certainty of guilt, the film portrays powerfully the devastating toll of the death penalty on the surviving family. In depicting the centrifugal harms of capital punishment, Apprentice exposes the impact of state killing on “the family,” that much vaunted political unit of Singaporean state investment. In this way, the film exposes the limits of discourses of autonomous individual responsibility and concomitant rhetorics of dignity. Apprentice makes vivid the relational dynamics of punishment and the impossibility of constraining its impact on the condemned.

Apprentice reinforces the relational conception of personhood in the context of the draconian death penalty jurisprudence in the Southeast Asian city-state, Singapore, a country, which has one of the world’s highest rates of execution and one of the highest incarceration rates in Asia. ²⁶ Singapore, considered the “world’s execution capital,” has an aggressive death penalty system where judges are required to impose a death sentence on every defendant convicted of murder. Especially notable is Singapore’s response to drug trafficking which, since 1975, is an offence punishable by death. The exceptional rise in Singapore’s death penalty in the 1980s and 1990s is attributed to its drug policy. The Singapore model of national development prioritizes economic development at the expense of individual liberties and crushes dissent with a heavy hand. Indeed, drug-related offenses have come to be construed as impeding smooth economic enterprise, damaging Singapore’s image as an enterprise capital. As a result, drug offenders were accused of sabotaging and damaging the national economy. The drug offense policies especially targeted “outsiders,” immigrants and ethnic minorities, who were seen as a scourge on Singapore’s economic progress.

The city-state of Singapore combines state authoritarianism and aggressive economic developmentalism. Singapore successfully de-couples market economy from liberalism: it embraces state intervention and promotes robust economic policies, while curtailing civil liberties. It is highly efficient in terms of its governance, while also crushing dissent unequivocally. While circulating rhetorics of “society before self,” the aggressive embrace of economic success has generated muscular meritocracy and self-reliance, producing state investment in individual responsibility that both evokes and effaces liberal tenets. ²⁷

The death penalty was introduced by British colonial authorities and subsequently retained by the ruling Peoples’ Action Party when it gained full independence in 1965. In Singapore, the death penalty serves a utilitarian function: its stringent punishment is supposed to deter criminal activity. The authoritarian state’s uncompromising zeal to retain Singapore’s image as a preferred global destination for enterprise investment has justified its harsh punitive policies. In particular, its stringent punishment for drug trafficking seeks to deter crime in the hope of attracting foreign capital. Punishment, thus, plays a crucial role in regulating and normatively shaping citizen conduct and instilling compliance as a civic virtue. ²⁸ As legal theorists like Franklin Zimring and David Johnson have cautioned, scholars should be suspicious of arguments concerning “Asian values” and cultural analytical vectors that drive the death penalty in Singapore, and look more squarely at its political economy. ²⁹ Attending to its single-party authoritarian rule, and the paucity of powerful pan-Asian human rights organizations offer more nuanced insights into this city-state’s draconian attachment to the death penalty.

As Singapore grows more secure in its economic status in a global economy, younger, educated, striving Singaporeans are restless for greater political participation. Their meritocratic accomplishments and exposure to global horizons of political freedoms have triggered resistance toward their predecessors who acquiesced to government and ceded their political liberties in exchange for economic security. As a consequence, Singapore now sees many more protests against the death penalty, including in the cultural sphere.

Apprentice portrays how a father’s execution affects his now adult children, Aiman Yusof, (played by Firdaus Rahman) and his sister, Suhaila Yusof (Matsura Ahma). Still haunted by his father’s killing, Aiman takes a position as a corrections officer in Singapore’s maximum-security Larangan Prison. Through Ayman’s eyes, the audience gets a closer, more intimate and textured glimpse of the prison where his father lived and died. There he meets and befriends the man who executed his father, the elderly and jovial Chief Executioner, Rahim, (Wan Hanafi Su) who comes to serve as a surrogate father to Ayman.

The cinematic aesthetics of Apprentice convey the somber mood and sense of secrecy that ripples throughout the plot. Whereas Clemency captures the sterility of the hospital ward in its depiction of the pristine and medicalized wards of the prison, Apprentice foregrounds the grimy materiality of the execution ward. The film cinematography is composed of darkness and shadows in scenes that wind through murky cavernous corridors. Most characters are pictured indoors, and often in proximity to prison bars. Even occasional shots of birds flying free in an expansive and iridescent evening sky are framed against barbed concertina wires atop prison walls. The gloomy, claustrophobic interior of the apartment that the young prison guard Ayman shares with his sister Suhaila is dark, with a spray of pungent acidic green. A handful of scenes take place outdoors, but even here we are confined within cars or trains, with fleeting glimpses of Singapore’s glittering urban nightscape. There is barely any nondiegetic sound in the film—mostly, we hear clanging prison doors, clattering prison keys, and heavy footfall as security guards walk toward the prison cells. The sonic signatures convey the heightened intensity that punctuates the humdrum rhythms of daily routine. On rare occasions, the soundscape floods the narrative, punctuating Ayman’s sense of isolation and his mounting sense of desperation.

Apprentice sets up an uncanny juxtaposition between the unremitting grimness of the execution chamber and the routine bureaucratic processes that preoccupies prison personnel. The film suggests that the horror of death penalty is not only found in the chambers where executions take place but also in dreary tube-lit offices where banal bureaucratic procedures and decisions regarding death penalty transpire. Rummaging through his past in such office cabinets in forbidden bureau rooms, Ayman looks for clues to help him piece together an image of a father he has never known. Furtively searching through dusty file cabinets, Ayman is desperate for a fuller knowledge of his father, and by extension, of himself. Yet, he looks for his father in the very place where he is nothing more than a static, one-dimensional “criminal offender.”

Ayman shuttles restlessly between competing images of his absent father. In assembling a picture of his father from painful shards of memory and media, Ayman juxtaposes old newspaper reports of his father’s crime with cheery family photographs. Visually, this juxtaposition serves to remind him that persons exceed categories like “criminal offender” that are unable to capture messy, incongruous, and shifting subjective formations. As a child, Ayman hides in a cabinet that he decorates with stickers of Popeye, whom he calls Papa. Imprisoned by what his father did and what was done to him in turn, Ayman cannot extricate himself from his family history and its subsequent generational trauma. Even as shame pervades every facet of his life, he is desperate to know more. His elusive search to comprehend his father through past ephemera suggests a fretful yearning to make whole his fragmented self.

Afraid of being abandoned by his sister who has been his primary caregiver, Ayman warns her that escaping to Australia with her fiancé will not release her from her past. In a harrowing scene, he confesses his terror to his sister, “I don’t want to be like him.” Ayman is anxious that perhaps he too may end up becoming a criminal. Suhaila responds, “You are not Father! And what if you are like him? He made mistakes. Everybody does. . . He wasn’t some monster. He truly cared for me. And for you, too.” While Suhaila humanizes her father by revealing the multi-dimensionality of his personhood, Ayman reduces his father to a cartoon character, a Popeye figure, and views him through the reductive category of “criminal offender.”

Ayman’s terror of turning into his father suggests how conceptions of criminal responsibility exceed the actor and permeate others within his orbit in uncanny ways. His anxious flight from the shadow of his father’s criminal identity leads Ayman to the figure of the executioner. The film depicts the growing filial bond that develops between Ayman and Chief Rahim. “You remind me of myself when I was younger,” Chief Rahim shares with Ayman, who beams proudly in response. When Rahim discovers that Ayman is the son of Yusof Ibrahim, whom he executed, a charged scene follows. Ayman struggles to convey his turmoil to the man who executed his father, “He committed the crime, and I have to pay for it? My whole life I’ve had to struggle with what he did.” The logic of just proportionality is disarrayed in this scene where the careful calculus of retributive payment is diffused and dispersed to others in the ambit of the condemned. The death penalty exceeds the autonomous actor of criminal offending and exacts a price that is paid not only with one’s life, but also with the lingering consequences that haunt the lives of those left behind.

For Ayman, the executioner and the executed reside in a single body. His father’s absent presence looms over his life. In one scene, he caresses and then wears the coarse hood, plunging the audience with him into the darkness of the hood. Ayman attempts to inhabit the place of his absent father, phenomenologically sensing what his father may have experienced. Stepping into the role of the proxy, Ayman is literally in the dark, save for the little glimmers of light that pierce through the coarse fabric. The audience inhabits this small dark space and settles into the rhythm of his breath swelling and dropping, gently at first before panic seizes him and he rips off the hood. As his surrogate, Ayman momentarily becomes a body double, a doppelganger, again visually underscoring the porosity of punishment. Attenuating the binary between the executioner and the executed, the film depicts the inner turmoil of Ayman, at once the son of executed murderer and the incoming successor of his father’s executioner.

Literally showing Ayman the ropes, Chief Executioner Rahim explains the art of execution to his new assistant, “In some countries they use the short drop. It is pitiful, the guy really suffers. . . They let him struggle for thirty minutes until he turns blue and soils his pants before he dies. But here. . . We are humane. We make sure it is quick and painless. The perfect job is when we fracture between the second and third vertebrae. This spot here. Can you feel it?” He touches Ayman’s neck, caressing and massaging the precise spot. Placing the knot around Ayman’s neck, Rahim continues, “When he drops, you’ll hear a crack. And that’s it. He stops moving. His heart stops. Everything stops. His soul is gone, just like that. The score for that? Ten out of ten.” Rahim takes pride in his work; indeed, he is exact, swift, and unerring. His perfectionism ensures that those executed die instantaneously, without much suffering. And yet, the film also displays Rahim’s anguish, which manifests in road rage, when confronted directly about his role in killing people.

Chief Rahim, whose name ironically means mercy, exudes “civility” toward the defendants on death row. Like Bernadine Williams in Clemency, Rahim ensures that the inmates receive a good meal to their liking prior to their execution. “Let them order what they want. Last meal, you know. Just let them be happy, right?” he jokes with other prison personnel as Ayman listens in. And then he mumbles cheekily, “We need to fatten them up. Too light and they won’t go down.” As he hoods them, he whispers to the inmate, “Don’t worry. . .I’m sending you to a better place.” The film portrays how he treats his prisoners with dignity, offering words of comfort and solace, even as he quips about it to his colleagues. The character of Rahim may have been modeled on Singapore’s most prolific executioner, the 73-year-old chief Darshan Singh, a Malaysian of Indian descent who served as the chief executioner for nearly fifty years, and hanged over 850 people during his tenure, roughly eighteen per year. ³⁰ “You are going to a better place,” he would whisper to the condemned just seconds before placing the hood on their heads and pulling the lever. ³¹

Ayman is put off by the anodyne humanizing discourses that paper over and attempt to obscure the brutality of the death penalty. He accuses Rahim of offering false comfort to prisoners and of paying lip service to assuage his own conscience. Rahim snaps back, “I did my job. I made it painless. That is compassion, understand?” Like Clemency, Appentice, too, shows how humanizing discourses sanitize the death penalty. Ayman refuses to participate in the hypocrisy. Unable to join in the charade of analgesic civility, he stares vacantly at the inmate, but no words of comfort come out of his mouth. Like Bernadine Williams, Ayman, too, becomes almost robotic in his attempt to dissociate from the cruelty that his profession demands. While Ayman starts his position in the prison as a warm and genial guard in the rehabilitation ward, his transfer to the execution ward coarsens him. He kicks awake an inmate during his prayers to escort him to the gallows. Indeed, the only strategy to survive the brutality of executing prisoners is to desensitize himself and eliminate any vestige of humanity. The callousness of killing cannot be mollified by humanizing discourses of dignity.

Apprentice exposes the torment instigated by the death penalty. The film shows clearly how trauma seeps beyond the autonomous defendant and afflicts his family as well as the wardens and guards of the prison. In capturing this traumatic dispersion, the film illustrates the radiating effects of state violence on kin, friends, and prison guards that come within its orbit. Ayman and his sister endure the lingering stigma of their father’s deeds. While Suhaila eventually flees Singapore to start a new life with her fiancé in Australia, Ayman sinks deeper, unable to extricate himself from the tentacles of shame that smother him. The execution of his father is not a singular and bounded event; rather, its lingering hold on those that survive this violence continues to mold their future.

The film captures the centrifugal forces unleashed by punishment, the sense of shame that impacts the offender’s family. Ayman underscores the relational ways in which punishment radiates outward beyond the condemned to envelope and distort the psyche of those he leaves behind. Ayman’s sense of shame complicates retributivist claims regarding the insulated autonomous criminal offender whose payment for their criminal offense redeems their dignity. The film makes clear that even though the condemned has paid for his crime with his life, there is no dignity, neither for him nor his survivors, whose clandestine lives are shrouded in shame and secrecy. The sense of criminal responsibility exceeds the autonomous offender and exacts its toll on his kin and loved ones. Apprentice makes vivid the impossibility of insulating a single individual as the object of punishment.

In the Kantian discourse of dignity, the person is imagined as bounded, insular, and autonomous—the dignified actor must take responsibility and pay recompense for their act. A person’s responsibility for their own actions constitutes their dignitas, or the special status of being human. This conception of personhood is undone in these films that expose the toxic radiation of capital punishment and the toll it takes on everyone that gets caught in its orbit. While many films on the death penalty focus on the suffering of the condemned, Chinonye Chukwu and Boo Junfeng enlarge the frame of capital punishment and shift the gaze from the condemned to the executioner. In addition, these films highlight the numerous lives, beyond that of the condemned, that are implicated in capital punishment. Such a framing allows us to see the relational ties that constitute all persons, the porosity of humans, the enmeshment of their attachments, and exposes the limits of Kantian conceptions of the autonomous and dignified actor, responsible for their moral choices.

Clemency and Apprentice move beyond a narrow conception of dignity that is enshrined in liberal conceptions of autonomous and insulated individualism. These films allow us to see responsibility as interpersonal, subjectivity as porous, and dignity as relational. They activate a more capacious understanding of dignity, not as the bounded property of the autonomous subject, but as the affective relationality between persons. They draw on theories of relationality that urge us to see dignity not as the property of an individual subject, but as connective tissue of society. Activating a poetics of relation, as Caribbean theorist Edouard Glissant would put it, such a conception allows us to see persons as co-implicated in one another, undone by each other, unrecognizable without the other. The contemporary calls for abolition animate not only a new relational understanding of dignity, but they also reimagine personhood, as exceeding the property of bounded liberal individualism. The calls to abolish prisons must be understood in this larger frame, as visions for new mappings of social relations and renewed ethical commitments for greater justice.