Edward Earl Johnson spends his last two weeks alive at Mississippi's Parchman penitentiary, convicted of the rape and murder of a white woman, and director Paul Hamann's cameras are inside with him. Hamann gets access most film crews never do: the warden overseeing the execution, the guards on death watch, the prison chaplain, and Johnson himself, along with his family. The film follows the routine of the countdown, meals, visits, paperwork, phone calls to lawyers, intercut with Johnson's own account of the night of the crime, which differs from the official record. Officials speak plainly about their jobs and what the law requires of them, without visible doubt. Johnson goes to the gas chamber still maintaining his innocence, and the camera stays close enough to register the specific mechanics of a state execution as they happen, not just the outcome. The film does not editorialize; it simply records both sides of the process, prison staff and condemned man, and lets the gap between their two certainties stand as the argument about capital punishment and race in the American South.