The Trouble with 'Innocence'
Excellent new doc shows that being exonerated is only half the battle
By Andy Klein
Back in 1988, Errol Morris received great acclaim for The Thin Blue Line, a documentary that reopened the murder case against Randall Adams, who was serving a life sentence for a crime he didn't commit. It was a riveting film, with arguments so compelling that Adams was eventually exonerated and freed. (Ironically, he then got involved in litigation against Morris over the rights to his story.)
Jessica Sanders's new After Innocence is, in a sense, a braid of seven or eight Thin Blue Lines, though, in all but one case, the wrongly convicted men had already been freed before Sanders started filming their stories. As a result, the movie is at least as much about the difficulty of picking up one's life after being released as it is about the flaws (and often the bad faith) of the criminal justice system and its enforcers.
Sanders focuses on the work of the Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, a few years before the pair achieved their greatest fame - or notoriety - as part of the O.J. Simpson defense team. The project has been involved in many of the 150 cases where the relatively new technique of DNA testing has led to definitive exoneration. Its stepchild, the nationwide Innocence Network, doesn't limit itself to DNA cases. (This is presumably the model for the "National Justice Project" on the new ABC series In Justice.)
Of course, lots of guilty convicts claim to be innocent. Why not? They have everything to win by doing so and nothing to lose. Unfortunately, this creates a lot of background noise drowning out the pleas of those who genuinely are innocent.
Most of the men in the film heard about the Innocence Project through Scheck's 1993 appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. Ever since, the group has been swamped by more mail from desperate inmates than the staff can read.
Sanders's selection of cases is demographically interesting. All are men; six of the seven were convicted of rape (usually with other related charges), one of first-degree murder. It's not stated, but one can guess that this is because rape cases are likeliest to have preserved evidence that would include DNA samples.
For whatever reason, three of the seven are black, the other four white. Racial and ethnic factors are never addressed; the film wants to make it clear that you don't have to be poor and black to get railroaded by the system. In short: It could happen to you.
The most compelling example of this is Scott Hornoff, who is not only white and middle-class, but - brace yourselves - a cop. Hornoff found himself serving a life term for the murder of a former girlfriend. After six years, he was released when the actual killer, picked up on other counts, confessed in a fit of remorse. Had Rhode Island allowed capital punishment, he would have certainly received a death sentence and might have been executed before the real perp revealed himself.
Hornoff used to believe in capital punishment; not surprisingly, he's changed his mind.
A repeated theme in the film is that getting released doesn't obliterate the injustice. Some of these guys served more than 20 years, barely out of their teens when they entered and in early middle age when released. They've missed the prime decades for beginning a career and a family. They are owed bigtime, but most states offer no compensation for the years spent in stir. A bus ticket home, and that's all she wrote.
In addition, they often have a tougher time post-incarceration than the genuinely guilty, and not merely because they are understandably more bitter. There is a whole bureaucracy in place to deal with parolees, but none for those who are exonerated. Most of these guys either manage to put aside their anger and get on with their new lives or funnel their rage into political activism directed toward preventing others from getting the same raw deal.
Sanders spends most of the first hour introducing the men and telling their stories one at a time. In the final half hour she intercuts shorter segments of their progress. Of the cases, the most compelling - it somehow seems in dubious taste to say "exciting" - is that of Wilton Dedge, who served 22 years for rape, based on flimsy evidence. What's amazing is that, after DNA testing had shown that the only physical evidence linking him to the crime - a strand of hair - couldn't have been his, the state of Florida - loath to admit a mistake - still refused to release him for another three years on various technicalities.
None of the men believes his case to be unique or even unusual; all have no doubt that thousands of other inmates are innocent.
Sanders has assemble a consistently interesting, often gripping and moving, film of the sort that presents some difficulties to a reviewer. That is, it's hard to call it great, no matter how effective it is, because of its virtues. Sanders has a point to get across, and she does so with focus and clarity, never getting in the way.
In contrast, The Thin Blue Line was criticized in many circles for aestheticizing its presentation. Morris included beautifully shot, heavily stylized reenactments of events to accompany voiceovers by various people involved in the case. It was a risky technique; it may have made the film more powerful, but it also made it seem "less real." (To be on the safe side, Morris refused to call it a documentary.)
I'm glad that Sanders didn't gussy up After Innocence with flashy devices, even though it ends up feeling more like PBS reportage than cinema art. This is a fairly frequent issue for documentaries that have a political or social agenda: In many cases, they are most praiseworthy when plain and most dubious when too conscious about being "art." This is by no means a putdown of documentaries, simply an observation that I have trouble assessing them in the same way I would assess a fictional film. After Innocence is terrific agitprop journalism/analysis, which is nothing to be sneezed at.
Published: 01/12/2006
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