Innocence Films Making Their Mark
With the release of the Oscar nominations today, we thought we'd mention a few lesser publicized films:
"After Innocence" was shown at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend. The New York Times today discusses the film, noting:
...viewers leaped to their feet, many in tears, at the end of the first screening on Saturday.
Thursday night, Court TV will air the film version of the critically aclaimed play, The Exonerated, starring Susan Sarandon, Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Aiden Quinn and more. It is directed by Bob Balaban, who also directed the play. The movie tells the story of six exonerated inmates.
Deadline is a film about the Illinois death row inmates whose sentences were commuted to life without parole by former Goveror George Ryan. It premiered at Sundance in 2004 but will be shown again at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival this weekend.
Current numbers: Since 1973, 117 people in 25 states have been released from death row with evidence of their innnocence.
The print media is also covering innocence cases. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a three part series this week:
[the series] results from the paper's two-month examination of the capital case against John George Spirko Jr., who remains on Ohio's death row for the 1982 murder of Elgin, Ohio postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger. The paper's investigation found that Spirko's imagination and "not much else" has bought him to the brink of execution and that without intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court or Governor Bob Taft, Spirko will likely be executed later this year despite concerns that he may be innocent.
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