We’ll resume on January 4 with Judgment at Nuremberg.

12 Angry Men is a wonderful movie, from the way it captures conversational rhythms (“That’s not bad, considering marmalade.”), to the careful way the jurors break down the case. But it’s a film that’s much more frightening than it is affirming. Lots of people have bad lawyers. Not everyone has an architect in white sweep into the jury room like an angel and do the work that defense lawyers and judges don’t. And it’s an illustration of how our assumptions about justice have become twisted, and how to reverse them a bit at a time.

It’s fascinating to watch Juror 8, a typically magnificent Henry Fonda, prosecute his case and to reverse his fellow jurors’ assumptions. When the jurors fist vote, a number of them don’t vote guilty until they see how the trend is going among their fellow jurors. They think it would be hard to be alone, but Juror 8 suggests that they’re doing the more difficult thing by consenting, telling them: “It’s not easy to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.” Then, there’s the assumption that doing due diligence as jurors is a form of sappiness rather than responsibility or sign of strength. “Why don’t you donate $5 to the cause and maybe it’ll make you feel better,” one of his impatient fellows grumbles at Juror 8, while another suggests that a jury trial is a privilege not to be expected: “He got a fair trial. What do you think that trial cost? He’s lucky to get it.” But eventually, Juror 11, a naturalized American, articulates why doing their jobs is a powerful thing. “That we are notified by mail to come down to this place to decide the guilt or innocence of a man we have never met before,” he tells his fellow deliberators. “This is one of the reasons we are strong. This is not a personal thing.” Gradually, almost all of them begin looking for clues, a critical turn in the case coming when the timid little man who goes along with the crowd notices the glasses marks on a fellow juror’s face that discredits the last piece of evidence standing.

And on a higher level, 12 Angry Men does a tremendously powerful job of making the desire to execute our fellow citizens, no matter their offenses, look perverse and unreliable rather than admirable, particularly in the climactic exchange between Juror 8 and Juror 3. “Are you his executioner?” Juror 8 asks the man who is most determined to convict no matter the evidence. “I’m one of them,” Juror 3 says, and when Juror 8 asks if he wants to pull the switch on the electric chair himself, insists, “For this kid, you bet I would.” Juror 8′s contempt is withering: “I feel sorry for you. What it must feel like to want to pull the switch. Ever since you walked into this room you’ve been acting like a self-appointed public avenger. You want this boy to die because you personally want it, not because of the facts. You’re a sadist.” I worry that a speech like this today would come across as the rankest liberal condescension. But it’s a critical point to make, that bloodlust isn’t admirable. Even if a dispassionate examination of the facts reveals someone to be guilty, there’s nothing attractive about wanting to kill them.

I have mixed feelings about the way the movie ultimately treats Juror 3. Humanizing him may make it easier for death penalty opponents to sympathize with him and his conversion. But not everyone who gets irrationally enthusiastic about the prospect of executions has a reason, however specious, for that sentiment. If it was just victims or parents of criminals who enthusiastically supported the death penalty, there would be a rationality to it. But it’s rooted in something broader in our culture, something less explicable, and less easy to contain. “Administration of justice is the firmest power of good,” is inscribed over the courthouse where the trial and deliberation take place. But it’s not necessarily clear that we believe it, much less that we’re willing to remove obstacles to that administration.

Next week, we’ll watch and discuss 12 Angry Men.

The thing that everyone remembers about To Kill a Mockingbird is the trial. Atticus Finch is one of the most beloved characters in fiction. Watching him break down the accusations against his black client* is masterful and tragic: the mangled arm, the angry father, the hysterical, clearly lying but also clearly brutalized, victim. But while I put this movie on the list as a way of sparking discussion about lawyers who defend clients who are facing the death penalty and the jurors who decide those cases, I found myself thinking far more about the person watching her lawyer father work: Scout Finch.

I’d forgotten how young Scout is in the novel and the movie — she’s just six. And the movie is both about her increasing awareness of the world around her and the way the world reaches out for her, the fact that the innocence of childhood is an imagined and impossible-to-maintain state.

There’s no question that, for a while, Atticus Finch buys into the idea that he can protect his children from his defense of Tom Robinson. When Del, the neighbor boy who is a stand-in for Harper Lee’s real-life neighbor, Truman Capote, suggests, “Let’s go over and watch!” the opening stages of the trial, Scout has a clear sense that her father wants her to stay away from his work. “He wouldn’t like that,” she says uneasily, but she and Jem follow Del anyway, listen to him explaining that through the courtroom doors that “There’s a whole lot of men sitting together on one side and there’s a man pointing at the colored man and yelling. They’re taking the colored man away.” When Atticus catches them, he sends them home immediately.

But that doesn’t really keep Scout away from the house. And even when Scout comes home, having whipped Cecil Jacobs for the sin of declaring that her father “defends niggers,” Atticus tries to draw the line, telling her, “There are some things that you’re not old enough to understand just yet. There’s been some hard talk around town.” But when it’s clear that his inquisitive daughter, the one who wants to know why she can’t inherit his watch, isn’t going to let it go, Atticus tries to give her the tools to deal with what’s going to happen to her, saying: “You’re going to hear some ugly talk about this in school. But you have to promise me one thing: that you won’t get into fights over it, no matter what they say to you.”
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After a sojourn in the 1990s and oughts, we’re going back in time next week to discuss the 1962 movie adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Get ready to get your Gregory Peck on.

This was my introduction to Oz, which all death penalty politics aside, was a fascinating experience. I tend to think of Breaking Bad as the most self-consciously artsy show on cable, particularly with the way it uses color. But Oz feels vastly more deliberately artificial, from Harold Perrineau’s narration and the backdrops thereof, from the way the show uses super-woozy shots to try to communicate what it feels like to be high. And the episodes are set up to feel like short story collections. Which makes it interesting to pick the story of Shirley Bellinger out of the fragmented glimpses we get of her.

She’s an interesting case: clearly and unrepentently guilty, but not particularly sympathetic, either. Some of the reason she’s off-putting is the way she performs her chilliness. “How comfy,” she says when she’s introduced to her cell. The facade of normality she puts on her imprisonment is downright unnerving. “Please, be seated. Would you like some tea? May I call you Tim?” she asks one of the prison administrators, immediately establishing that she’s in control. “The warden has informed me that I may choose the means by which I will die, and I thought you might be able to help me pick one out.” You’d think she was in denial, except then she simulates her own hanging with the yarn she keeps in her room. When another death row inmate asks what she had for her last meal, she tells him, “A nice Slim-Fast milkshake. A girl’s got to protect her figure, even if she’s a corpse.” Her composure is aimed at treating her jailers — and ultimately, the people who will execute her — like they’re the crazy ones, particularly when it lets her play with them and deny them information. “My lover was Satan in the form of a man,” Shirley says on her way to the gallows. “A lady never reveals such secrets. But I’ll give you a hint. Neither rain, nor snow.”

And that facade of normality, that attempt to put everyone else on edge, makes her less sympathetic when she tries to connect or to play for sympathy. “I’m wondering why anyone cares what my thoughts were,” she tells the news team interviewing her right before her execution. “Sure as hell didn’t didn’t care when my husband was drunk and beating me. Or when my father-in-law raped me. It wasn’t until I killed my daughter, that I did something horrific.” Shirley is living in a logic of her own making, where the failure of the system and the rules of society to protect her justify any attempt to be, as Augustus Hill puts it, “remembered for a thousand years. The things you did reaching across time and touching people not yet born…that’s why people write books, start religions, find cures.”
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Just a reminder, for next week, we’ll be watching Oz Season 2, Episode 3; Season 3, Episode 7; Season 4, Episode 4. The show is available through HBO GO.

So it turns out that Last Dance is about a party boy who finds his purpose working in the appeals office for a Southern state government, falls in love with a murderer played by Sharon Stone, and after she’s executed, takes an Annie Lennox-scored trip to the Taj Mahal in her memory and as a way to express that he’s finally really, seriously at peace with himself. In other words, it’s a pretty terrible movie, chock-full of sassy black death row inmates who call Stone’s sweet former-addict killer “girl” a lot, a weak-sauce and sentimental discussion of racial and economic disparities in the death penalty, and a lot of thick-accented callous Southern stereotypes. But it does a couple of things that I think are interesting, even if I don’t think it does them particularly well.

First is the way it addresses lingering discomfort with executing women. Sam, the head of the appeals office, treats feminism as if it’s a joke that women have played on themselves, suggesting that executions of women are up because of the “Women’s lobby. They all want equal treatment in the eyes of the law.” Rick, the young attorney who’s come to work for Sam while he figures out what he wants to do with his life, expresses bewilderment that a woman could commit the crime Cindy’s guilty of, bludgeoning two wealthy young people to death — Sam tells him, “Most of the time when a woman kills, it’s a crime of passion.” Later, the pompous, tough-on-crime governor informs Rick that “Her sex made no difference to her victims. It makes no difference to us under our legal system.” These are platitudes and stereotypes, but there’s a real issue here about how gender plays into our expectations about violent behavior, and our willingness to exert violence against women in the name of the state. If crimes against women, particularly white women, inspire moral outrage, violent crimes committed by women also challenge our conceptions of gendered behavior.

Second, there’s the question of how race and class interact in the death penalty, which is mostly addressed when Rick, told to stay away from Cindy’s case, visits a black inmate who’s earned a law degree and written a best-seller about his moral evolution on death row. He predicts, accurately as it turns out, that the narrative of his transformation will earn him a reprieve that Cindy is denied. “What’s the smart money saying? Who’s going to live, me or the white girl?” he asks Rick. “They will be diminished by my death because I represent everything they love and admire. How are they going to kill a man who’s been on the New York Times best-seller list?” I don’t know that it’s true that politicians are less afraid to appear classist than they are to appear racist, especially when it comes to black men and crime, but against, it’s an interesting proposition, one the movie floats and lets gets away before it can explore it further.
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Colin Miller, a professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who’s been kind enough to riff off some of my Pop Culture and the Death Penalty Project posts, points out something fascinating: if you’ve been impacted by a movie about the death penalty, you can get kicked off a jury:

In Blackmon v. State, 7 So.3d 397 (Ala.Crim.App. 2005), during death-qualification, two juror were struck because they indicated that The Green Mile had an impact on how they view the death penalty. Fictional films might distort factual reality. They might distort legal reality. They might simplify complex issues. But they matter…Based upon the work of the Innocence Project, most people know that many convictions are houses of cards built on faulty eyewitness identifications and coerced confessions. And while many might not be aware of the current public defender crisis, surely it has seeped into the public consciousness that impoverished young defendants with neophyte lawyers are receiving something less than the Platonic ideal of representation. A juror is death-qualified when he is willing to impose the death penalty. But is that juror qualified to deal with the consequences of his decision to impose death? What if a witness for the prosecution recants his testimony? What if an alibi witness appears? What if DNA evidence points to another suspect? What if this evidence comes after the execution? Is the juror qualified to deal with his choice to impose death? Is anyone qualified?

If there’s anyone in the audience who’s worked a death penalty case, on either side, I’d be curious to hear if it’s come up. But it’s a reminder of something important. A lot of our conversations about pop culture presume that it’s either not very good at making a definitive case for issues, or that it gets bogged down when it goes too didactic. It’s worth remembering that pop culture can play a useful role in complicating issues rather than simply clarifying it. Casting doubt on accepted wisdom is at least as important a as writing party platforms.

Programming note: I know a lot of folks will be going out of town for Thanksgiving, so let’s do Last Dance for Wednesday, Nov. 30.

Monster is less a movie about the death penalty than a portrait of American misery. But Aileen Wuronos is, in Patty Jenkins’ masterful and disturbing movie, simultaneously the most unnerving and maybe the most deserving of pity guilty murderer we’ve explored in this series.

One of the things that’s striking about the story of her deprivation and abandonment is how it emerges through the movie. While we see her bathing and drying her hair in a public bathroom, trying to buy herself a few more minutes to get ready for the day, we don’t know until nearly the end of the movie that she had and gave up a baby at 13, or that she was repeatedly raped as a child. She tells us about the ferris wheel she loved as a child — “They called it the Monster. As a kid, I thought it was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen.” — in essentially the same tone that she delivers off-hand accounts from an absolutely brutalized life. When she and Selby, a feckless young girl who takes her in, have their first real date at a roller rink, kissing for the first time to “Don’t Stop Believing,” it’s a brilliant use of the song because it’s so sick given what’s to follow, and the basic desperation of Aileen’s existence. There isn’t a single trauma that’s a signpost in her life, a moment that fractured an otherwise peaceful existence. Murder may be a step up for her, but people have done everything to her other than murder her. “I loved her,” Aileen explains after her lover Selby has helped capture her confession on a wiretap. “And the thing that no one either realized about me, or believed, was that I could learn.” But it takes much more than one successful relationship, especially where one partner is urging the other to keep working as a prostitute to support her, to give someone the skills she needs to survive in society, or a reasonable expectation that society will protect her. “Where there’s life, there’s hope. They gotta tell you something,” Aileen tells us as she’s being led out of court after being sentenced to death.
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Back in September, when my friend and colleague Alex Seitz-Wald, saw Werner Herzog’s death penalty documentary Into the Abyss at the Telluride Film Festival, he wasn’t particularly fond of it. But I’ve seen it twice now, and while I think there is a more politically pointed movie to be made out of some of the characters in Into the Abyss, the movie is both artistically lovely and lends an important rigor to our debates about the death penalty.

The movie centers around Michael Perry, a death row inmate who was executed in Texas this summer, Jason Burkett, who is serving life in prison for the murders they committed together, and the families of their victims. There isn’t any real question about whether Perry and Burkett are guilty, or that the people whose brothers and mother they murdered remain shattered more than a decade after the crimes were committed. And there aren’t racial disparities at play: Burkett and Perry are both white, and they murdered a white woman and two white teenagers over a mediocre convertible. In most artistic considerations of the death penalty — and in most of the cases taken up by activists — there would be some doubt about their guilt or whether the system works, and that doubt would be the basis for the arguments against the death penalty. But Perry is not only guilty, he’s reptilianly unsympathetic. After confessing to the crime, Perry maintained his innocence before his death, telling Herzog at one point during their interviews that Herzog should get out of Texas as soon as possible so they don’t execute him too. He’s a useful test of Herzog’s — and our — commitment to the idea that the state should not kill human beings. When Lisa Stotler, who lost her mother and her brother to Perry and Burkett, says that “some people just don’t deserve to live,” Perry is probably not the most effective of all possible refutations to her belief.

What the movie does very well, though, is to suggest that the death penalty is part of a larger messed-up tapestry, a world where people get stabbed with screwdrivers and go to work; where kids of school age can essentially slip off the radar of their families and the system; where a car is worth committing murder for. The movie can veer into Southern gothic, a bit. Interviewing one of Burkett’s friends from before the murder, Herzog questions him with anthropological interest about his inability to read before a prison term, and he has a tendency to put words in his subjects mouths, taking the frequent “Yes, sir” responses he gets to leading questions as actual assent. Burkett’s wife, who’s become pregnant despite the fact that she and her husband aren’t allowed to do more than kiss and hold hands during his prison bid, and insists that she isn’t a murder groupie despite some deeply odd romantic comedy notions of dating a prisoner, is decidedly unnerving.

But some of the movie’s best moments come not out of those more grotesque moments, but when Herzog manages to suggest there’s something deeply wrong with the world at large. When he has a detective who investigated the case walk him through the crime scenes, Herzog shoots the man against Crater Lake, where Perry and Burkett dumped Sandra Stotler’s body: the shot is framed so the trees surrounding the lake are reflected upside down, a vision of a world confusing and reversed. And watching Fred Allen, the former captain of the death row squad that executed Perry, talk about how he’s only become able to appreciate the world again after quitting the job is heart-rending—and probably would have made a better coda than the sloppy epilogue Herzog tacks on at the end.

Into the Abyss won’t work for everyone, and it doesn’t precisely do the work of the death penalty abolition movie. I could have watched an entire movie about Allen’s decision to give up his pension and give up the work of executions. But the death penalty is a strange thing, existing in defiance of logic or the rules of sound public policy. Some movies should make arguments. And some should make manifest the strange, powerful impulses in the American psyche.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

In “Death Row Tip,” everyone’s digging up the past as Lockhart/Gardner become tangentially involved in a death row case because Ricky Parker, the convict in question, gives information to the police (and a documentarian) about a gang murder. When the police dig up the body, they find the body of a missing young woman as well, and Lockhart/Gardner represents her boyfriend, who is arrested for her murder. They’re convinced that, instead, her murder is related to the gang killing, even though a 14-year-old gang member confesses to the latter. Parker suggested to the documentarian that he knew who really committed the crime, but he’s scheduled to be executed within hours. Lockhart/Gardner therefore agrees to help the defense attorney with Parker’s appeal in return for access to him. They do eventually solve the murders and exonerate their client, but that’s almost incidental; what the show cares about is the death penalty issues the case raises. No one really thinks Parker is innocent, so their appeal rests on testimony from his mother that she neglected him and testimony from his priest that he is actually a good person – and all of it is blatantly untrue. This prompts Alicia to examine her feelings about the death penalty, and, somewhat surprisingly, the show decided to make her one of the characters most in favor of it. The defense attorney and the priest both argue that it’s morally acceptable to say whatever needs to be said in the appeal because the death penalty is always morally wrong, but Alicia isn’t buying it, partially because the girls that Parker raped and murdered were Grace’s age.

It would have been interesting to have Will more involved in this case, because I’m not sure how his constant internal conflict between pragmatism and idealism would have shaken out in this situation. But he was distracted by being investigated by Cary and Dana, who now seem to suspect him of buying off a corrupt judge. He knows that Diane is watching him and Alicia closely, and suspects that Peter is going after him because of Alicia, but when Alicia shoots down his idea of “pausing” their relationship, he certainly doesn’t fight very hard. He still doesn’t seem to have told Alicia much about the investigation, and I can’t decide whether he’s trying to protect her or trying to keep her from discovering something about his past. In Alicia’s absence, Will’s main ally is Kalinda, which in turn calls into question Kalinda’s actual motivations in her escalating love triangle with Cary and Dana. Kalinda spends much of the episode flirting with Dana, and Cary is blatantly jealous, possibly of both of them. But after they have a close call when a suspect starts shooting, Cary and Kalinda finally kiss – and then he gives her a weird look and walks away. I suspect that Kalinda is actually letting herself feel things for once, but Cary has no reason to think she’s not playing him, so this turn of events should play interestingly into the investigation into Will.
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Just a reminder, we’re doing a screening of Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss tomorrow in Washington, DC. Details on how to RSVP are here. And we’ll head over to the second-floor bar at the Gallery Place Clyde’s to discuss the movie after the screening is over. Next week, we begin our conversation about women and the death penalty, and we’ll be watching and discussing Patty Jenkins’ Monster.

One of the things I’ve found interesting about John Grisham’s work is the extent to which he’s shifted from telling stories in which his main characters, who tend to be straight, white men, do the right thing when faced with criminality, to stories in which those same straight, white men end up joining social justice movements. Rev. Keith Schroeder’s journey in The Confession is identical to that taken by Michael Brock in The Street Lawyer: two men who believe they’re not directly influenced or threatened by injustice find themselves in the path of its unintended consequences, and come to believe that their sense of remove is unsustainable. There’s no question that these kinds of stories risk becoming The Help redux, tales about white saviors who rescue disadvantaged people from problems they’re unable to work their way out of. But in Grisham’s stories, his white boys tend to fail: an execution takes place, a homeless family freezes to death. The work these men end up doing is within movements, not at the head of them.

But it’s the things that bring them to consciousness that matter. Because while The Confession is far from Grisham’s best novel, it’s about a critically important problem: the profound need many people have to believe the criminal justice system works, and how it makes them violently resistant to the prospect that it errs, and that people can die as a result of those mistakes.
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In the comments thread in last week’s conversation, I confessed some ambivalence about the position that I’ve staked out here: that it makes more sense to set the standard for conversation about the death penalty that it should be abolished in all circumstances, even in the astonishingly unlikely chance that we achieve a perfectly just criminal justice system that has no clear disparate impact on people of any rage, gender, class, or creed. I say that not because I think we’re more likely to achieve a durable opposition to the death penalty by relaying on pragmatic arguments rather than moral ones — I think it may initially seem easier to bring people in with pragmatic arguments, but that may not achieve the depth of consensus we hope for. But rather, I confess some ambivalence because I have never been the victim of a violent crime, and I’ve had the good fortune that no one in my family has been touched by violent crime either. I’d like to believe that if such a thing were to come to pass, I would resist the urge to take another person’s life, but I’m afraid that I wouldn’t, that the better angels of my nature would be decisively scattered and I would want what I now profess to abhor. Which I suppose is as good an argument for total abolition as any: if we can’t trust ourselves in moments of extremism, perhaps some tools should be taken away from us.

But on to The Green Mile. It’s a fascinating — and very sentimental movie — and to a certain extent, it’s not particularly useful as a basis for a real-world conversation about the death penalty. People who perform executions may have the experience of helping to kill innocent people — we know some of them certainly have. But they’re deeply unlikely to execute people who are not only innocent but honest-to-god saintly miracle workers who absolve them on the way to the electric chair, telling them, as John tells Paul, “You tell God the father it was a kindness you done.” But the movie is an intermittently powerful allegory about responsibility, and the way we distance ourselves from culpability and full understanding of what we’re doing.

That distance is part of the way Paul explains his work to his elderly listener, and to himself. “Death row was usually called the Last Mile. We called ours the Green Mile,” he says. “The floor was the color of faded limes. We had the electric chair. Old Sparky, we called it.” These are cute names for terrible things, the wait for your death at the hands of the state, the instrument of your death, which even when it goes well, is an ugly, traumatic thing — and far worse when your death is sabotaged by a sadistic prison guard. But the characters struggle with the distance that lets them do their day-to-day jobs, and the need to honestly confront what they do when they take a man’s life. We know Percy is disgusting not just because he’s cruel, but because when he deliberately sabotages an execution in a way that makes the man’s death prolonged and hideously painful, he tries not to witness what he’s wrought. By contrast, we feel sympathy with, not disgust for, Paul when he hesitates to give the order to execute John because he’s meditated on the terrible work he’s about to perform. His sense of duty and his sense of right conflict. And when we learn Paul is living out a vastly extended life because “It’s my torment. It’s my punishment for letting John Coffey ride the light,” I can’t help but wonder if he’d be tormented in the same way if he’d executed anyone else.
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