Ndume Olatushani, sentenced to death in Tennessee in 1985 for the murder of a greengrocer during a robbery, spent 28 years in prison, 20 of them on death row. He was held all those years in a cell where he could not even stretch his arms, 23 hours a day, and even when he got out, he had chains on his ankles, "tied up like an imaginary monster...", he describes. To survive, art helped him, gave him hope to get up every morning, not to give up, especially after the brutal death of his mother two years after his incarceration.

The death penalty situation in the US is very uneven from state to state, and at the federal level, an official moratorium was declared on July 1st 2021 in response to the wave of executions under the Trump administration after a 17-year hiatus. Numerous studies have demonstrated the influence of race in the application of the death penalty at both state and federal levels in the USA. This bias relates to the skin colour of the victim, the accused, and the jurors. While about half of all murder victims are white, 75% of death sentences are for white victims. Nationwide from 1977 to 2020, 295 black people were executed for the murder of white people, compared to 21 white people for the murder of black people. Finally, a study in North Carolina found that potential black jurors were excluded twice as often as white jurors, and in 2010, 20% of those sentenced to death were sentenced by an all-white jury.

Ndume testifies that he was tried in the city of Memphis, whose population was 50% black in 1985, but by an all-white jury, which took less than four hours to rule on his guilt and sentence him to death. After 20 years of fighting to prove his innocence, the Tennessee judiciary offered him an Alford plea, allowing the convicted man to waive his formal exoneration in exchange for his immediate release. Ndume accepted, was released in 2012, but lost his right to reparations for the 28 years he spent in prison while innocent, lost his right to vote, the real perpetrator is still at large, and jurors and prosecutors will never be held accountable for his wrongful conviction.