John H. Wood Jr. was a man with a family and a career and a judicial philosophy, whether or not one agreed with that philosophy. He was killed because he was expected to impose a maximum sentence on a drug trafficker who did not want to face that sentence. He was sixty-three years old when he was shot in the back in a parking lot on his way to work. The killing was, among other things, an attempt to intimidate the federal judiciary — to demonstrate that a judge whose decisions were sufficiently inconvenient to the drug trade could be made to pay for those decisions with his life. President Carter called it an assault on the justice system itself, and that characterization was accurate.
Woody Harrelson did not kill anyone. He grew up without his father, discovered as an adult that his father was a convicted murderer, and chose to maintain a relationship with him rather than to disavow him. He funded legal appeals that failed. He stood in at a proxy wedding. He described his father as charming and articulate and as someone whose influence on him was “mixed” — making him “think outlaw” while not making him want to hurt anyone.
These are the documented facts of what Woody Harrelson did in relation to his father’s case. They do not make him complicit in the killing of Judge Wood. They do not make him a morally perfect figure who transcended his origins. They make him a man who navigated an unusual and painful biographical situation with a combination of loyalty and pragmatism and love for someone who had not been present to parent him but who was nonetheless his father.