Apr 05 2013
Guardian: Death penalty film-makers hit the road to profile America’s exonerees
They belong to a very small and extremely unusual club that has only 142 members. The factor that unites them is that they have all experienced America’s capital punishment system at first hand, yet lived to tell the tale.
This is the club of death row exonerees. Its members include Kirk Bloodsworth, the first death row inmate to be exonerated by DNA evidence in 1993 and now an anti-death penalty campaigner of national renown.
Then there is Damon Thibodeaux, who walked free last September, an innocent man, from the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana where he spent 15 years in the shadow of the death chamber. And the only woman in this peculiar group, Sabrina Butler, who was wrongfully sentenced to death by Mississippi in 1990 for killing her nine-month-old son, compounding the grief of a teenaged mother who had lost her first born, as it later transpired, to liver failure.
Now a pair of film-makers from London are planning to profile this exceptional club of death row exonerees in a creative experiment that will see them travel 4,500 miles across the US in an RV, in which they will drive, eat, sleep and edit as they go in what they hope will be a ground-breaking interactive documentary project. They are calling it One for Ten – after a simple but harrowing fact: that since the death penalty resumed in America after a hiatus in 1976, there have been 1,323 executions and 142 exonerations.
In other words, for every 10 prisoners executed, another one has been allowed to walk free because the death sentence was found to be unreliable.
“Whether or not you agree with the death penalty, that’s an outrageous level of failure,” says Will Francome, who will be hitting the road next month [April] along with his film-making partner Mark Pizzey. “The consequences of such glaring flaws are horrifying – if you get the death penalty wrong it’s irreversible.”
The 30ft RV will embark from New York on 11 April, and end up in Las Vegas on 18 May. The idea is that in the course of five intense weeks, the team will meet and make an internet film about 10 exonerees, each one representing a different critical problem with the application of the death penalty in America.
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One Response to “Guardian: Death penalty film-makers hit the road to profile America’s exonerees”
Our judicial system is good, but not perfect. Wrongful Death Penalty Convictions resulting in Exonerations attributed to work by the Innocence Project:
There have been 305 post-conviction DNA exonerations in 36 States;
Of these exonerations 25% were self-confessions pressured by the law enforcement investigators;
There are numerous cases where the DNA evident was destroyed, or otherwise disappeared after the convictions.