Ratcheting Up Death Row

Why Upgrade? Now that government funding has been cut like a spaniel’s scrotum, many of us public radio vets will continue to provide unfiltered insight, irony, and the kind of “why” reporting that refuses to kiss power’s ring. Volunteering in our own careers like cockeyed Paul Reveres to get the message out. Corporate coffers can’t buy integrity, but your subscription can.

You wake up in a country that can measure everything—your steps, your sleep, your sodium intake—but can’t seem to measure the value of a human life without a coupon code. Here, life is a line item: priced by zoning boards, discounted by insurers, surge-priced by hospitals, and repossessed by bureaucracy with all the warmth of a parking ticket. We’re told life is sacred; then we’re handed a menu where the “sacred” comes à la carte—air optional, dignity extra, hope sold separately, batteries not included.

The creed is simple: if you’re profitable, you’re precious; if you’re expensive, you’re expendable. We confected a neat little miracle where a newborn’s first breath costs more than a used car and a dying person’s last breath is vetted by a spreadsheet.

We’ve got a government that assures you it can’t manage a clinic, but by god, it can engineer your exit with a laboratory’s poise. “We love life,” it swears, “and we’ll prove it by rationing food at school, rationing air in the office, rationing mercy at trial; rationing lives on death row.” Our politics treat life like an inconvenient rumor: everyone cites it, nobody budgets for it. The same chorus that hymns “sanctity” will shrug when the lights go out at the shelter, when the water tastes like coins, when the ambulance arrives with a payment plan.

You can sample the thunder for yourself. The full film just won 1st Place at La Femme. It’s online only for a few days—and first ten of you can see it for free with promo code KPFK2025 at tinyurl.com/windowdeathrow.

And you? You’re instructed to clap on cue. Clap for the charity that keeps the poor alive long enough to thank their benefactors. Clap for the fundraising telethon that turns agony into a variety hour. Clap for the brand-new “awareness month” because awareness is cheaper than action and looks great on a sash. We’ve replaced the golden rule with the quarterly report; kindness now arrives through a checkout page—“Would you like to round up your humanity today?”

And yes, here in the land of the free, more than thirty people have already been executed this year—the highest clip in a decade. While public support keeps softening, the train’s still accelerating even as the passengers lose enthusiasm for the destination. Over in Europe, they’d call our methods medieval cosplay; here, we rebrand suffocation as “nitrogen hypoxia,” as if diction could tidy the act. There’s no nice way to kill someone—ask any chaplain who’s watched a “humane” execution unravel into a sermon on pain and paperwork. Our leaders, of course, promise a better mousetrap tomorrow, once it finds the right drug cocktail and a sponsor.

Our exhibit today is a window—literally: The Window on Death Row, an Oscar-qualified indie that refuses the Netflix True-Crime Diet of gawking, gasps, and tidy moral algebra. This film doesn’t ask you to rubberneck; it asks you to reckon. It follows Joaquín José Martínez, the first Spaniard exonerated from U.S. death row—a man the machine nearly turned into paperwork. The film’s about second chances, which is another way of saying it’s about whether we, as a country that worships redemption stories, actually believe in redemption…. when it counts.

Now, to help you test your conscience—and maybe dent it—I’ve got two heavy hitters.

Linda Freund, the director who refused the True-Crime Template™ and made something braver.

And Mike Farrell—the same Captain B.J. Hunnicutt from M*A*S*H—who’s spent decades turning California’s appetite for the needle into a political question mark…. and now helms Death Penalty Focus. He once framed the only question that matters: it isn’t whether they deserve to live; it’s whether we deserve to kill.

Why Upgrade? Now that government funding has been yanked, many of us public radio vets will continue to provide unfiltered insight, irony, and the kind of “why” reporting that refuses to kiss power’s ring. Corporate coffers can’t buy integrity, but your subscription can.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/s