We live in an age where there are videos on YouTube of everyone, from random people to celebrities, proclaiming and analyzing the last meal choices of previously executed inmates, as well as what they might ask for themselves should the moment come. The only problem is that these people and celebrities, unless they do something really stupid, will never know what it’s like to be asked what they want to eat prior to their execution. The gravity of the situation they are depicting in these clips they make for views is more accurately and poignantly illustrated in writer-director Linda Catherine Freund’s The Window on Death Row.
Though swift in running length, Freund’s harrowing yet triumphant tale of Joaquín José Martínez, who spent five years in a cell, three of which he was awaiting his execution for a double murder of which he was innocent, is a heartbreaking whilst emerging as a transformative reflection both on the miscarriages of the US justice system alongside the capital punishment which is set as a final solution to bring closure to the victims of crime. But as a former death row chaplain states in the picture, “What is closure?” For he has witnessed the last, both peaceful and terrifying moments, as botched executions strip away the humane element of the death penalty and strip it back to outright torture.
Still, Martinez, over two decades after escaping a death sentence, is far from bitter. “I would have been dead today if I hadn’t gone to death row,” he intones at one point. For the experience changed him not merely personally, but spiritually. He recalls being placed in the row and feeling so helpless and alone, yet soon the voices of the hardened criminals around him came to him in comfort and offered him food, and that thing called hope.
“…Joaquín José Martínez, who spent five years in a cell, three of which he was awaiting his execution for a double murder of which he was innocent…”
The Window on Death Row charts the botched collection of evidence that led to Martinez’s incarceration, to the retrial funded by those who always believed in his innocence, to finally his redemption and his life today as a pure and passionate person, father, husband, and advocate against capital punishment. From the darkness of cells to the celebratory streets of Valencia, where Martinez journeys with his family to experience the Fallas festival of life and faith that he only ever saw on postcards, and thankfully endured to experience.
Finally, from within the walls of a Spanish prison, from which Francisco Franco executed nonconformists in the 36-year dictatorial regime over which he presided, Martinez finds peace at the center of himself. The fight to live, the fight against injustice, the fight against the inhumane punishment of criminals. These are battles, one after another, that must and continue to be fought in order to bring, not just to the surface of our awareness, but also a consciousness that not everyone behind bars are criminals, and not all who would pass judgment upon them are innocent.
The Window on Death Row plays out like a real-world Shawshank Redemption. It provokes deeper questions and deeper thoughts about how we judge, and how we allow laws to enslave and murder those we deem worthy of such a penalty, but also how the same legal processes can see the innocent punished in a manner society would reserve for those it would seem despicable. This film looks beyond what we believe is right and good and true, showing that the reality of systems of control is frightening, because that persecuting eye can fall on the just and the unjust alike.
"…provokes deeper questions and deeper thoughts about how we judge..."
