The professional life he built — the eight years of Cheers, the Oscar nominations, the range of characters from Woody Boyd to Mickey Knox to Marty Hart to Haymitch Abernathy — was built in parallel with the father’s imprisonment and in spite of it. The professional life does not exist because of the father’s crimes, and it does not exist in order to compensate for them. It exists because Woody Harrelson is a skilled actor who has worked diligently for four decades and has made a series of professional choices that, taken together, constitute a distinguished career.
The career and the biography coexist. They do not resolve each other. The son whose father killed a federal judge for money became the actor who played a hitman in Oliver Stone’s most provocative film and a corrupt lawman in a prestige cable drama about the persistence of evil. The connection between the biography and the roles is available to be noticed. The meaning of that connection is more than the facts alone can settle.
## The Enduring Questions
Some things about the Harrelson family story remain genuinely unresolved and probably always will.
The question of whether Charles Harrelson received a fair trial is one of them. The disproportion in resources between the prosecution and the defense was real and substantial. The trial judge’s role as a pallbearer at Judge Wood’s funeral was a specific kind of appearance problem, even if it does not establish that the judge’s rulings were biased. The reliance on cooperating witnesses — people testifying in exchange for reduced sentences — is a feature of federal prosecutorial practice that has been criticized by legal scholars and practitioners for the specific distortions it creates in the evidentiary picture.