Warden Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard) is surrounded by death. In her time as the Warden of her all-male prison, she's overseen the execution of twelve different human beings, the most recent of which went horribly awry. Williams maintains her composure on the outside to a steely degree, she's convinced she's got to. But on the inside, she's shaken up, visions of that execution chamber float into her brain during the day and haunt her nightmares. The detached emotional state she uses to cope with her employment is starting to test her marriage to Jonathan (Wendell Pierce) and is going into overdrive with the impending execution of Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), a man who's been on death row for 15 years for a crime he maintains he did not commit.
