Television Reviews : Last Days of a Convicted Murderer in ‘Execution’

You’re likely to find yourself waiting or even hoping for a dramatic happy Hollywood ending to “Execution: 14 Days in May” tonight at 10 on HBO cable (repeated Thursday and again May 31).

But it’ll never come.

You also might expect to be hectored ad nauseam about the heinousness of the death penalty during this hourlong installment of HBO’s “America Undercover” series. But you won’t be.

Nevertheless, the tick-by-tick documentation of the last tortured days of convicted murderer Edward Earl Johnson creates a gripping real-life drama and makes a powerful--though emotionally overloaded and extremely one-sided--statement against the death penalty.

Johnson as a teen-ager was convicted by a racially mixed jury of killing a white town marshal in Mississippi in 1979. The routine, institutional preparations for Johnson’s “typical death-row” execution in 1987 at Parchman Penitentiary--including testing the gas chamber by gassing a rabbit in a cage--are turned into a nightmare by British film maker Paul Hamann’s lesson in cinema verite.

As the days count down, the mild-mannered, likable Johnson is strangely calm as he discusses his fate and quietly insists he’s innocent. He plays chess, prays with chaplins, confers with his lawyer and eats his last meal with his family, who hug him goodby like he’s just going to be taking a train to Chicago.

It is all so mundane and unnervingly personal that at times it becomes like a surreal home movie. In a bizarre surprise, the no-one-is-really-shooting-this-film spell is shattered when, 20 minutes before Johnson’s date with death, film maker Hamann steps out into camera view and, hugging Johnson, says: “It’s time for us to go. Our hearts are with you and we’re still praying for you. Good luck.”

All sympathy--from prison guards and reluctant Prison Superintendent Donald Cabana to the viewer’s--accrues to Johnson, who is simple-minded but saintly. Of course, the murder victim and the gruesome details of his death by gunfire are barely mentioned, and his family’s grief is long forgotten.

But “Execution,” whose minimalist narration is by New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, isn’t meant to be balanced. Although its cinema-verite style means that important background details are never provided, it’s an artful piece of propaganda that will affect many more hearts than it will win over minds.