
Fault Lines - Politics of Death Row
Josh Rushing, a presenter for Al Jazeera's Fault Lines, travels to Oklahoma to examine why the state executes more prisoners per capita than anywhere else in the country, gaining rare access to its death row. He interviews inmates and officials including Commissioner Justin Jones, alongside legal experts like Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, former death row prisoner Greg Wilhoit, and former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating. The film lays out the numbers driving the debate: roughly eighty percent of US executions happen in a handful of Southern states where politicians campaign on being tough on crime, while DNA testing and revisited cases have freed more than 130 innocent people from death row since 1973. That shift shows in public opinion too, support for capital punishment fell from eighty percent in 1994 to sixty-five percent by 2006. Rushing sits with victims' family members as well as those who nearly died for crimes they did not commit, tracking how fear of executing an innocent person is quietly changing how juries decide.