Analysing a documentary called "14 Days in May".

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Bilal Jabbar D11F                                                                                   Page  of

GCSE ENGLSIH COURSEWORK

“FOURTEEN DAYS IN MAY”

In this piece of English course I am going to be analysing a documentary called “14 Days in May”. This documentary is produced by a TV Director who diverges with Capital Punishment.  I will be focusing on the presentational devices used by this director in order to get his point across and how he tries to persuade the audience into believing that Capital Punishment is erroneous.  

Therefore this documentary “14 Days in May” has been set in the state of Mississippi in 1979. It is about the story of Edward Earl Johnson (EEJ) who is an uneducated black male and has been charged with the shooting dead of a (white) police Marshall and the attempted rape of a 60 year old (white) woman. Now EEJ had spent the last 8 years on death row appealing the case and is to be executed in Fourteen (14) days time from now onwards. To fight EEJ’s lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has stood up for him. Stafford Smith has also won stays of executions in over 200 cases and has lost only 4 of those cases. This documentary exhibits the last two weeks of EEJ’s life, and its focal point is on the affects this has on the staff of the penitentiary and deathrow inmates, who are also on death row.

On the other hand the death penalty is widely used in the Southern States of America like: Texas, Alabama and Mississippi because of the issue of racial disparity; which is that recent findings indicate that there is unfair application of Capital Punishment in the United States, when examined in terms of race. These racial disparities include the two mentioned below:

The race of those Sentenced: in September 2000, the Justice Department reported that African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities were considered for the federal death penalty more often than whites. The incidents of minority federal capital defendant account for 74 percent of such cases since 1995. So the statistics already back up from the very start the Director’s argument that there is a flaw in the Justice system.

By Race of the Victim: According to the ALUC, a study of Georgia’s executions found that,

“Over 60 % of murder victims since 1972 have been African American, but 20 out 0f 22 people executed during that period had murdered white victims. Georgia prosecutors seek the death penalty in 70 % of cases involving crime committed by blacks against other racial combinations. “A Stanford Law Review study found similar disparities based on the race of the victim in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Virginia.

Again this all links back to the background history of Black people in the USA. It all started during the 18th and 19th Centuries slaves were taken from the continent of Africa to the USA. Then during the civil rights movement the northern American states wanted to abolish slavery, where as the southern American states like: Texas, Alabama and Mississippi wanted to keep their slaves because southern states had huge farm lands for the slaves to work on. So giving up slaves meant giving up money. But very soon slavery had to be abolished in the southern states as well, because too many riots and demonstrations started happening. It is still believed that black people are still treated different (usually badly) because of their race superiority. This connects with “14 Days in May” because the racial background of black people in the USA is used by the director to suggest that black defendants are still treated unjustly in death penalty cases in the USA, mainly Southern States.

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Therefore there are just as many arguments against Capital Punishment as there are millions of different people. There are many arguments that the director of “14 Days in May” puts forward, to persuade the audience into believing that Capital Punishment is wrong.

He gives the audience the idea that Capital Punishment is used discriminatorily along racial lines in the USA, and he uses this ideas and expresses it through EEJ. So due to the history of how black people were treated in the USA, the audience from the very start fell sympathetic towards EEJ, because he is black man ...

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