A Long Hallway

Today's execution in Tennessee, and how a television show I never watched led me to death row

In March, I did a reading at City Winery with Writers Read for a literary event themed around television. Without giving too much away (essay is below!), I wrote about the show Prison Break and eventually working on death row in Tennessee.

In a few hours Tennessee plans to kill Oscar Smith in its first execution since 2020, which also happens to be the year I left my job as an investigator. There is a lot to say about how much has changed in that time—and how little—when it comes to the death penalty in this country. But this morning my eyes are on my former state and my heart is with Oscar, his family, his victims, and everyone who will be impacted by this execution.

So much is happening everywhere, all the time, and none of us can witness it all. But soon a human being will be pulled from a prison cell, strapped to a gurney, and put to death with an injection that looks clinical but is just as tortuous as the electric chair where my client was killed in 2019. I urge you not to look away.

The television show that has had the biggest impact on my life is one that I have never seen, but you may have. Prison Break premiered in 2005 to huge success on Fox, about two brothers: one who’s been sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit, and the other who gets himself incarcerated to save him.

I became familiar with the premise—and brother #2’s shirtless, tattooed back—because while I never saw Prison Break, I was devoted to watching Fox’s American Idol every Tuesday and Wednesday. I was eleven and awed, practicing “Blackbird” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in the shower, certain my covers were essential additions to the canon.

One night, after a two-for-one footlong Subway ad, the TV cut to a Prison Break teaser. Brother #1 wore all white, his head shaved clean. Sweat blistered on his brow as he was marched, shackled, down a long hallway. Cut to what was waiting for him in the next room: an electric chair, empty.

I knew executions existed. I was in year five of nine at Catholic school, so I’d already spent almost 1000 days beneath crucifix-topped chalkboards, Jesus mid-execution on constant display. But something about brother #1’s face launched a hailstone up my throat. I rushed to the bathroom and leaned my forehead against the tile walls. My lungs were sinking, useless things, foreign in my body as it grasped for the memory of how to breathe.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I knew Prison Break wasn’t real, but capital punishment was. And while I lay beneath my lavender-and-white checkered bedspread, thousands of people slept on thin prison cots knowing that one day, they would be pulled from those cells and killed. For months I had nightmares. To combat them, I spent hours on my clunky green laptop reading Wikipedia articles. But even as the reality of capital punishment convinced me to rally against it, I skirted fictional television scenes that would bring back the nightmares, and the dread.

You don’t realize how often The Green Mile plays on cable TV until you’re trying to avoid it.

I track what to stay away from—The Other Boleyn Girl and The Executioner’s Song, of course, but you’d be surprised how many gallows Disney greenlit in Pirates of the Caribbean.

I get older, and learn how much mental illness and poverty and racism permeate death row, and still I squint at the tiny TV screen blaring The Crucible in my 10th grade English classroom, trying to keep my breath steady.

I pause and play my way through Capote on my then-boyfriend’s basement television, and I enroll in every class my college offers about the prison system.

Finally I watch Dead Man Walking, and I graduate from school, and I apply to work as an investigator helping people on Tennessee’s death row with their appeals. During my interview, an attorney asks what got me interested in this work.

“Well, I was watching TV one night, and this clip from Prison Break came on…” I begin. I get the job.

Just as I start, Tennessee resumes executions for the first time in a decade. Within a year, I am hugging my client goodbye for the last time, a few days before he is marched from his cell, down a long hallway, to a waiting electric chair. He wears all white, his head shaved clean.

I don’t know if I would’ve spent the years I did working on death row if those 90 seconds of Prison Break hadn’t lodged themself into my brain. But I do know that all those shows and movies I avoided, then began to watch, let me practice being the person I hoped I could be, when it came to it: the kind of person who is not afraid to let their heart break. Who does not let feeling preclude doing, or doing preclude feeling.

Who does not look away.