WHO:	Mixed ReviewerJill Cozzi
WHAT:	A review from the 2005 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
WHERE:	The Armory and the Carolina Theatre, Durham, NC

In the U.S., we like to believe that innocent people are never convicted of crimes; that the justice system always works the way it's supposed to, and that if a few innocent people are convicted, it's a small price to pay for a safe society. As long as those wrongly convicted have no faces and no names, it's easy to be cavalier about the injustice of punishing the innocent. After all, they are just unfortunate dolphins in the tuna nets of the criminal justice system; the collateral damage of crime fighting. Despite the ideal of innocence until guilt is proven, the reality is often much different, particularly for those unable to afford pricey legal representation. It's ironic, then, that two representatives of perhaps the most infamous murder case in the last 25 years are the founders of an organization the mission of which is to exonerate the innocent through DNA testing.

Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project are profiled in Jessica Sanders' new documentary film for Showtime, AFTER INNOCENCE, along with some of the men wrongly convicted who have been exonerated through their efforts. For these men, walking out of prison free after six, ten, or nineteen years in prison, or in one case, twenty-six years on Death Row, is hardly the end of the Kafkaesque nightmare of their lives, it's just the beginning of a different phase.of that nightmare.

For Vincent Moto, who served 10-1/2 years for a rape he didn't commit, it means having to check the "yes" box on job applications which ask "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" This is because exoneration does not mean expungement of the criminal record. It also means losing those vital years in one's 20's during which one establishes oneself as an adult, as a man, with a family and a career. For Nick Yarris, who served twenty-six years on Death Row for a crime he didn't commit, it means a commitment to Pennsylvania's abolition project, which seeks to end the death penalty in Pennsylvania. As Yarris notes, if you're guilty and paroled, you get job training, health care, counseling, and the other assistance you need to re-acclimate to society. If you're innocent and exonerated, you're put on a bus and sent away with nothing. For Dennis Maher, who served nineteen years for rape and assault before being exonerated, it means starting over in your 40's. For lifelong Warwick, RI resident and police officer Scott Hornoff, who served 6-1/2 years for the murder of a woman with whom he'd had a brief fling, it means being burnt by the very institutions you've spent your life admiring and serving. "If you didn't do this," he used to tell people he apprehended, "I don't want you saying you did." Naturally, he assumed his brethren on the force had the same respect for truth.

And these are some of the lucky ones. For diminutive Wilton Dedge, serving two life sentences in Cross City, Florida for rape, it means continuing to live behind bars for three years AFTER hairs found on the scene were proven to not be his. Have you ever seen the cowed demeanor and wary eyes of a dog that has been beaten for years? That is the countenance of Wilton Dedge.

Yet Sanders' film isn't simply a documentation of criminal justice atrocities, though they're certainly omnipresent. For each of the men profiled, while some have prospered more than others, show a remarkable lack of rage and bitterness at having been so wronged by the system, instead choosing activism in an attempt to spare others from meeting the same fate at the hands of prosecutors more interested in mounting heads on spikes than in finding the truth. "Anger stagnates a person's growth", muses Calvin Willis of Shreveport, LA, who lost 22 years of his life to a wrong conviction. For Ronald Cotton, wrongly imprisoned due to an erroneous identification by the woman he was accused of raping, it means not just forgiving the victim of the crime, whom no one would fault him for hating, but touring with her around the country to educate people about the dangers of relying too much on witness identification. In fact, 88 percent of the rape cases in which the man convicted of the crime was exonerated involve mistaken identification in a lineup. That police departments still rely on lineups is appalling, since they represent only a very limited universe of potential perpetrators, so that the one who looks most like the perpetrator tends to be identified, even if his only crime was being unfortunate enough to be picked for a lineup.

It's heartening to know that there are still young attorneys and activists who have not forgotten that America is about justice, about setting an example for the rest of the world. DNA testing has given them an invaluable tool with which to work, but without these people's commitment to the truth, many of these men would still be behind bars. Yet for all the optimism and uplist contained in this story, watching Florida prosecutors shrug off the results of Wilton Dedge's DNA testing in an attempt to deny him a new trial, let alone exoneration is troubling. One wonders what the future of legal forensics are in a country in which faith is already superseding science in creating policy. Will prosecutors be able to ignore such evidence in the future if they can claim that they know a man is guilty because God told them?

Anyone who thinks that men such as those appearing in this film should just "move on" and forget about reparations, who think that honest mistakes happen and they should just dust themselves off, should watch this film, look into the sad, dead eyes of Wilton Dedge and then into their souls and decide if they still believe this is simply "collateral damage."

**********

Watching Sanders' film on the heels of the first two installments of Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's THE STAIRCASE creates a troubling conundrum. THE STAIRCASE, which deals with the OTHER Peterson trial, this one of Durham, NC resident Michael Peterson for the murder of his wife, Kathleen, is the story not of the working--class men of After Innocence, but instead of an affluent, well-known local resident able to afford as much representation as needed to exculpate himself...and find it still not enough.

On December 9, 2001, Michael Peterson, a published author, failed mayoral candidate and gadfly columnist for the local newspaper, placed a 911 call that his wife had fallen down the stairs. He was charged with murder, tried, and eventually convicted, after a trial which peeled the layers off the couple's seemingly perfect existence, revelaing the proverbial dark underbelly of affluent suburban life.

As someone who experienced first-hand the ubiquity of coverage of the Westfield, New Jersey murders of his family by devout churchgoer John List in 1971, I can understand the "story fatigue" that most residents of the Durham area have with their own "Peterson murder case". But the story is nonetheless compelling, particularly in the way a Southern prosecutor, even one in such a relatively cosmopolitan area of the South, latched on to the defendant's secret private activities involving sexual encounters with men -- encounters which may have been discovered by Kathleen Peterson, leading to her death.

THE STAIRCASE is as of this writing running on Sundance as an eight part series, two of which were screened at Full Frame Fest 2005. It's clear from conversations this critic had with family living in the area that the general consensus is that Michael Peterson murdered his wife that December night three years ago. It's also clear that the filmmakers disagree. Whether because of the unfettered access de Lestrade was were given to the defense team or because of belief in the defendant's innocence, the filmmakers open the door to the possibility, articulated by Peterson himself in an echo of the paranoia and self-aggrandizement shown by O.J. Simpson, that overzealous politicians were out to "get him" because of his exposure of official corruption in his newspaper columns. Similarly, they broach the possibility, articulated by Peterson's brother, that Peterson was scapegoated for his sexual proclivities.

Like so many "true crime" stories, THE STAIRCASE unfolds like a murder mystery right out of fiction, complete with a mysterious suspect with a secret life; the kind of lifestyle most of us can only dream of, the pathologist (Henry Lee) from the Simpson trial; even ghosts from the past that may shed light on the present. Unfortunately, the one-quarter of this story shown at Full Frame doesn't tell the uninitiated the entire story, but its careful unfolding and presumably unraveling of the mystery of Kathleen Peterson's death makes for compelling viewing, even as we not only hate ourselves for feeling compelled to watch, but also wonder along with the filmmakers, if Peterson just might be like those men profiled in the film about the Simpson trial's other alumni's efforts.

- Jill Cozzi