Sunday, February 24, 2013
JUSTICE BLINDFOLD SLIPS
I am going to be watching a series of documentaries by the master doc guy
He is the master of the one shot closeup. He is tireless in the pursuit of truth.
His interviews are exercises in revealing what really happened, what the person is really thinking.
Today's film is a good example of this "detective" work.
It was a NYTimes Best 1176 Film.
in which a convict named Randall Adams is found to have some considerable "reasonable doubt" in his case. That he was railroaded seems undeniable.
It is a tour de force. Music by Philip Glass is a little too woozie for me but otherwise, it is a gem of personal testimony combined with re-enactment.
A cop stops a car. The cop is shot. The police cannot find a suspect until they turn up a punk kid who tells them "who did it". Could be that he was actually the one "who".
Dallas Texas. Not the cradle of justice evidently. The balance tilts the wrong way and the lady is peeking out from the blindfold.
This is a 5 by definition as I saw it before and was happy to watch it again.
The story continued after this film. At the end of the film, Adams is still in jail due to a technicality in court procedures around appeals.
Then, events shifted.
From Wikipedia:
In 1989, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Ex parte Adams[6] overturned Adams' conviction on the grounds of malfeasance by the prosecutor Douglas D. Mulder and inconsistencies in the testimony of a key witness, Emily Miller.[7][8] The appeals court found that prosecutor Mulder withheld a statement by Emily Miller to the police that cast doubt on her credibility and also allowed her to give perjured testimony. Further, the court found that after Adams' attorney discovered the statement late in Adams' trial, Mulder falsely told the court that he did not know the witness's whereabouts. The case remained in limbo.[9] In 1981, Mulder returned to practice private law in Dallas,[10] and the new prosecution then dropped charges in 1989.[11] The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said (and Adams agreed) that "conviction was unfair mainly because of prosecutor Doug Mulder."[12][13] Adams later worked as an anti-death penalty activist.Adams wrote a book about his story, Adams V. Texas, which was published in June 1992.[14] [edit]Lawsuit over the story
After release from prison, Adams ended up in a legal battle with Errol Morris, the director of The Thin Blue Line, concerning the rights to his story. The matter was settled out of court after Adams was granted sole use of anything written or made on the subject of his life.[15] Adams said of the matter: "Mr. Morris felt he had the exclusive rights to my life story. ... I did not sue Errol Morris for any money or any percentages of The Thin Blue Line, though the media portrayed it that way."[16] Morris, for his part, remembers: "When he got out, he became very angry at the fact that he had signed a release giving me rights to his life story. And he felt as though I had stolen something from him. Maybe I had, maybe I just don't understand what it's like to be in prison for that long, for a crime you hadn't committed. In a certain sense, the whole crazy deal with the release was fueled by my relationship with his attorney. And it's a long, complicated story, but I guess when people are involved, there's always a mess somewhere."[17] At a legislative hearing, Adams said:“ The man you see before you is here by the grace of God. The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room and, if it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me.[18]
