Clemency

Director Chinonye Chukwu

Director Chinonye Chukwu with actress Alfre Woodard (left)

CLEMENCY              B                    

USA  (113 mi)  2019  d: Chinonye Chukwu

I am invisible, understand, because people refuse to see me.

⸺Prologue to Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, 1952

A wrenchingly grim morality play that exposes the harmful repercussions of the death penalty by revealing the banality of prison routine, where those working on the premises are equally confined behind prison corridors, and while they’re allowed to go home every night, they’re haunted by the habitual bleakness of the experience.  Stripped down to a spare minimalism, the film feels prolonged and overly detached, even hopeless, often losing that essential emotional connection.  Largely modeled after Troy Davis, a black death row inmate executed for murdering a white police officer by the state of Georgia in 2011, who eloquently spoke directly to the parents of the murdered victim just moments before his execution claiming he had nothing to do with the murder and carried no weapon at the scene.  With no forensic evidence connecting him to the crime, the case was based solely on eye witness testimony, with 7 of the 9 eye witnesses either recanting or contradicting their original testimony, claiming they were pressured by the police to identify Davis as the killer, while Davis himself originally pled guilty, later claiming his confession was coerced under police pressure.  Of the remaining two witnesses, one may have actually been the shooter, as a second witness heard his actual confession, but the courts never allowed this into the record, leaving serious doubts about the guilty verdict.  Equally appalling, three previous times his execution was stayed at the last moment, with Davis tragically forced to endure the final experience with imminent death a total of four times, which feels unusually cruel.  Opening and closing with the meticulous recreation of a state-ordered execution, there are incredible pressures involved with carrying out this act, not only to the prisoner, but to the medical staff, the guards, the prison chaplain, and the warden who oversees the entire procedure up to the moment of death.  What role does this play in their lives, especially when it happens a multitude of times, as it’s hard to prevent death from having such a prominent and significant impact on one’s life, as the chilling magnitude of the act itself tends to overpower everything else, as there are families involved, lawyers, public pressures, vocal demonstrators on the grounds of the prison, news organizations clamoring for access, not to mention the effect it has on other prisoners, where in their eyes all prison support staff become complicit with the execution.  This film leaves no doubt as to which side of the political aisle it leans, advocating for the abolishment of the death penalty altogether, which is what one-half of Americans feel as well, but the states with the highest execution rates would include Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri, Georgia, and Alabama, all former Confederate states that once allowed slavery, rarely apologizing or offering regrets for their former barbaric mistreatment, historically viewing prisoners (and slaves) as less than human, undeserving of better treatment, intentionally underfunding the prison facilities, where there are simply no visible political winds of change in the foreseeable future. 

Currently utilized by 29 states, while banned in 21 other states, the death penalty for federal crimes was reinstated in July 2019 after a 16-year hiatus.  Despite problems associated with the death penalty, with the medical profession refusing to provide lethal drugs for executions and doctors excluded from death chambers, as it violates their Hippocratic Oath to preserve life, occasional scenarios have developed with over forty botched executions since the death penalty reinstatement in 1976, where people didn’t die immediately, resulting in a prolonged sense of lingering agony due to technical malfunctions.  One such case exists at the outset, where an execution doesn’t go as planned, as they try repeatedly to find a vein to hold the IV entry, including his feet and stomach, causing excruciating pain, then the medicine doesn’t kick in, with witnesses present fully aware, sensing a catastrophe, becoming something of an extreme embarrassment, with internal conflicts requiring reviews and professional oversight, yet the death row warden, Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), behaved in exemplary fashion, as all went according to plan except the results, as the procedure itself failed, her twelfth execution in seven years, never really rising to that same hair-raising level of emotional intensity again.  The film is seen through her eyes, as she’s responsible for all the decisions, carrying out much of the dirty work herself, which includes a meticulous sharing of the final details with the prisoner before it happens, taking them through the entire process ahead of time, so they know exactly what to expect.  What the film reveals is a series of isolated moments, each one painfully recreated in exact detail, with little left to the imagination, as it takes us directly into the execution chamber.  Williams is obviously affected by what happens, as it challenges one’s basic humanity to the core, stripping you bare, under the circumstances, where there’s no place to hide.  The film recalls Boo Junfeng’s Apprentice (2016),  a similar exposé of executions taking place in Singapore, where the hangman’s attention to details is exact, with the drama elevated by having such an extreme sense of firsthand intimacy of an execution taking place.  This film idealizes a best case scenario, where the people involved sympathize and care deeply about the outcome, as their collaboration with death has an impact on their personal relationships, which are difficult to maintain, with such an ominous force continually hovering over them, always threatening, where that’s something difficult to compartmentalize, as if you could simply ignore it all by command.  Instead it plays out as a gut-wrenching melodrama, where the closeness to death wreaks havoc on families, who are never shielded from the pain, finding themselves continually exposed to further emotional damage.  According to recent reports from Washington State University, the rate of PTSD among prison employees equals that of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, with higher rates for women, black employees, and those with more than ten years of experience.  For those working on death row, the numbers are likely even further elevated, where the effect on staff for putting a potentially innocent victim to death is immeasurable.   

Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize, the result of eight years of research talking to wardens, men on death row and their lawyers, the film primarily generates empathy, which is an essential ingredient if one is searching to obtain meaningful social justice.  Much of the film’s raw dramatic power can be read on Bernadine’s face, as the warden’s life is scrutinized from all angles, from her husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce), who describes her life as “an empty shell,” pushing him away, teaching herself not to care, learning how to live without feelings, becoming somehow impenetrable, yet she can’t sleep at night and appears to have a drinking problem (and may be having an affair), or the next prisoner scheduled to die, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), who maintains his innocence, shutting down emotionally, sharing little, but does appreciate visits from his attorney Marty Lumetta (Richard Schiff), who is himself retiring with this final case, as it takes too much of a toll on his life.  Little background information is provided, hardly anything about the former life of Woods, so when a rush of new information is provided on the eve of execution, one feels suspicious of the motives, like why now, as it feels like a narrative device to build him up only to let him down in the end, where the crash is that much more dramatically excruciating.  Since so much time is spent in the actual prison, one should mention just how overly quiet it is, which is not a reflection of reality, as prisons are chaotic and noisy, particularly in underfunded, dilapidated, and overcrowded facilities that were not built to absorb sound, instead reverberating with profanity, loud conversations, even uncontrolled yelling erupting throughout the day and night mixing with mechanical noises and the clanking of the iron cells.  It may surprise viewers to see a female warden, as there were none prior to 1970, yet aided by civil rights legislation they are regularly assigned to both men and women’s facilities, but even fewer black females, as it’s a position dominated by white men (70%).  In the state of Texas, Warden Cynthia Tilley in Teague has the unique distinction of having had a father in prison that she visited regularly as she was growing up, but overall, black women comprise only 3% of all wardens, far fewer on death row.  There are studies (Female Wardens - Academia.edu) that suggest female wardens are more likely than men to reflect a more caring ethic, like supporting the goal of prison rehabilitation, more readily accepting suggestions from staff, including greater input from correctional officers and inmates, while they are less likely than men to advocate for the reduction of services, programs, and amenities.  However, as is shown in the film, they are also less likely to seek support in addressing the stresses of their jobs, which means (particularly overseeing death row) they are overly internalizing the process, often with negative results, as so much of one’s inner self gets shut down, as there’s no outlet for those complicated built-up feelings and emotions.  There’s a brief moment between Williams and the prison chaplain (Michael O’Neill) about how to best help the prisoner from becoming too overwhelmed by the bleakness of the systematic routines, but they could just as easily have been talking about themselves, suggesting state sanctioned killing has an odor of toxicity to it that’s impossible to shed for everyone involved. 

Just Mercy

Director Destin Daniel Cretton

 

Bryan Stevenson

 

Actor Michael B. Jordan (left) with Bryan Stevenson

 

JUST MERCY            B                   

USA  (136 mi)  2019  d: Destin Daniel Cretton                     Official site

The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving.

— Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (354 pages), 2014

Inspired by real events, the film follows the aspiring career of Harvard educated lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Michael B. Jordan from Fruitvale Station (2013), soft-spoken and reserved, always showing restraint, formally dressed in a suit and tie, adapting his 2014 published memoirs by the same name, growing up in a poor rural community, initially working out of a private residence before setting up practice of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, a law office providing free legal representation to prisoners condemned to death row in the state of Alabama who have been denied access to a fair trial.  According to the film, Bryan Stevenson has worked to release 140 death row inmates in Alabama, where one in 9 death row inmates have been exonerated based on wrongful convictions, resulting in exonerations far higher than for any other category of criminal convictions, where perjury/false accusations and official misconduct are the leading causes of wrongful convictions, which typically go unchallenged by the court appointed lawyers, exposing poor blacks to an unequal judicial process where justice for the poor almost never happens, as it’s reserved instead for the wealthy elite who can pay for it, effectively dividing the nation into two separate and unequal factions where the law is applied differently, disclaiming the inscription engraved into the U.S. Supreme Court building that promises “Equal Justice Under Law.”  Made by the director of Short Term 12 (2013), Hawaiian filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton integrated his own personal experiences from working at a group home for at-risk teenagers in pursuit of altering our perceptions of kids stuck in a dehumanized system struggling for survival.  Here he examines the inequities of the death penalty when empowered and administered by Jim Crow ethical standards, where obtaining a conviction by law and order district attorneys supersedes any pursuit for the truth, as this is the political platform they run on to get elected, making the community a safer place to live, which all but excludes the black community, where residents historically are forced to live in fear of the police and the authoritatively repressive judicial system where innocent men routinely get charged and convicted for crimes they never committed.  Added to the mix are prisoners who did commit crimes, but were sentenced with greater severity due to an inherent bias leveled against blacks.  The effects of racism, such a prevalent condition in our society, continue to exist on so many levels, yet the place where its impact is felt the most is the judicial system where blacks continue to be warehoused into lengthy periods of incarceration at record levels, where there aren’t enough lawyers assisting the poor, and racial minorities are routinely excluded from jury service, particularly in poor rural counties, making it difficult to put an end to these reprehensible and often antiquated practices.  Major cities are not immune from this same racial differentiation, as blacks nationwide are 30% more likely than whites to be sent to prison for committing the exact same crime (Sentencing Commission Finds Black Men Receive Longer ...).  While this film shines a light to expose the inequities, accentuating trials that are marked by blatant racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct while highlighting the damage done to families and communities, yet this inherent racial bias has simply become a routinely accepted standard deeply entrenched into the fabric of the judicial system in America, where the death penalty is a direct descendant of lynching.  By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings for the first time.  Two-thirds of people executed in the 1930’s were black, yet even after the African-American share of the South’s population fell to just 22% by 1950, 75% of people executed in the South were black.  More than eight in ten lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, as did more than eight in ten of the nearly 1500 executions carried out in this country since 1976 (Death Penalty - Equal Justice Initiative). 

One of the inherent flaws of the Hollywood system is there aren’t enough black filmmakers given the opportunity to make films like this, so the stories continue to be told by people outside the black community, offering a more stereotypical vantage point and a decidedly different emotional texture, where the structure of the film itself becomes stereotyped as a crusader movie, where in this case the “white savior” has been replaced by a “black savior,” yet in Alabama, the ultimate decisions are rendered by white judges from one of three appellate courts, the state Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, and Court of Civil Appeals, totaling 19 judges, where there is a noticeable absence of black judges in such prestigious positions, (Why Aren't There More Black Federal Judges in Alabama ...).  One of just five states that hold partisan, statewide elections for judges (in a state that is nearly 70% white, where judges boast during their campaigns about the number of death sentences they’ve imposed), since 1994 every black candidate for the state’s 19 appellate judgeships has lost to a white candidate, with the courts remaining all-white and all-Republican (including 41 of the state’s 42 elected district attorneys), where according to a 2012 report, white judges are four times more likely than minority judges to dismiss race discrimination cases.  Despite overwhelming evidence to suggest bias that stems from the days of slavery to Jim Crow to lynching, where the original commerce conducted in Montgomery, Alabama was in enslaved people, the location of Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative office is just steps away from where they once held massive slave auctions, bringing people off the boat, parading them up and down the street in chains, becoming the most active slave-trading space in America for almost a decade, with dozens of cast-iron historical markers celebrating aspects of the Confederacy.  Little has been done historically to humanize the criminal justice system, with this film providing a face for viewers to empathize with, as one of the most incendiary cases is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), known as Johnny D, sentenced to death in 1987 for the murder of an 18-year old white girl who worked as a clerk in a dry cleaning store in Monroeville, Alabama, based solely on the questionable testimony of a white convict, Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson), ignoring multiple black alibi witnesses at the trial, which lasted just a day and a half.  While the jury sentenced him to life imprisonment, the judge (aptly named Robert E. Lee Key) overruled the jury and sentenced him to death, with judicial override accounting for 20% of the people currently sitting on death row in Alabama, a practice that was outlawed by the state in 2017, yet the state persists in executing people on death row prior to the implementation of the law.  Despite the flimsy evidence to convict, McMillian lost all his prior appeals for a new trial.  By the time Stevenson meets him in prison, he’s lost all hope, showing little interest in a wide-eyed Ivy League lawyer from the north who knows nothing about the ways of Alabama.  The tone of the film resembles IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967), pitting the legal sophistication of Stevenson against the antiquity of southern racism, where humiliating blacks and instilling fear is a way of life, fueled by a venomous culture of white supremacy that historically produced lynchings and killings, yet established in heinous acts just how blacks are treated in the Jim Crow South.  In contrast, Atticus Finch, the white court-appointed lawyer portrayed by Gregory Peck in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), was voted as the greatest hero of all American cinema in 2003 by the American Film Institute, AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains - Wikipedia, where the courtroom sequence of the film adaptation was set in a courthouse in that same Monroeville, Alabama that remains the town’s main tourist attraction.  Even in the UK, a 2016 literary survey voted Atticus Finch the most inspiring character in literature (To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch voted most inspiring ...).  And therein lies the problem with films like this, as the white idealization is overwhelming, requiring a Messiah-like figure to stand up to centuries of appalling racial animosity, making audiences feel good, but the entrenched systematic bias continues, where mass incarceration of black people actually defines the era we are currently living in.

While Stevenson has consistently been recognized as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America, awarded a MacArthur Grant among a multitude of distinguished honors and awards, Brie Larson stars as Eva Ansley, adding Southern flavor as the local girl who becomes the operations director, described by Stevenson as “fearless and smart,” who’s been there since the beginning working side by side with Stevenson (actually starting on her dining room table), working long hours into the night, assisting him on his exhaustive research, providing administrative duties while handling the reporting and accounting of their federal funding.  While not an attorney, she’s a mom committed to rectifying what she sees as terrible injustices happening within her community, with most content to allow racial transgressions to continue unabated, but she feels a moral obligation to do something about it, to be on the side providing social justice.  While the film has a formulaic structure to it, the authenticity of the characters stand out, where the best moments are often reduced to small extended scenes in tiny rooms or prison cells, intimate conversations that don’t overreach, becoming remarkably poignant and quietly affecting, offering a deeply ingrained understanding of just who and what we’re dealing with.  Whether it be Stevenson’s visits to Holman Prison or the time spent with each of the death row prisoners he meets, their images are seared into the viewer’s imaginations, becoming permanent fixtures, with each telling their own story of how they became ostracized and rejected by society, stripped of any self-worth, dehumanized, often doubting their own innocence, as that guilty verdict has been drummed into their consciousness.  Stevenson’s role is to take each of these essentially dead souls and bring them back to life, challenging the negative stereotypes, where it’s easy to pass judgment, showing another side, one that viewers can relate to.  He starts by visiting McMillian’s family living on the outskirts of town, mirroring similar visits made by Atticus Finch, where one gets the feeling so little has changed for these families since the Civil Rights era of the last 50 years, where progress was granted to a few, yet a large majority in rural America were left behind, the living examples of a separate but unequal society.  While they’ve essentially taken away all that matters to McMillian, what’s clear is no one in his community thinks he did it, while the white community is in near unanimous agreement that he did.  So when a black lawyer starts poking around with these unsettling, racially tinged cases that already led to a conviction, the white community resents someone stirring up all these ancient memories, as they rest easily, content to lock him up and throw away the key, believing the case is closed.  Rafe Spall is Tommy Chapman, the newly elected white District Attorney, yet he shows no inclinations to reopen the case, believing Stevenson is alone and isolated, where he is perceived as no threat.  But the more he looks into these cases, the more he becomes convinced these cases are a travesty of justice, filing legal briefs bringing new evidence into light that question the legitimacy of the verdict, yet appeals courts in Alabama rarely overturn the convictions of death row inmates.  While there are setbacks along the way, and frequent intimidation tactics that recall the times of antiquity, one central focus of the film is witnessing in stark detail the execution of a prisoner, a chilling reminder of what this is all about, as Alabama consistently has one of the highest execution rates in the United States, executing 11 people convicted by juries of a life sentence, overridden by judges and instead condemned to die.  It’s an emotional tearjerker fraught with heartbreak and personal anguish, as setbacks are built into the system, creating an underlying feeling of helplessness and systematic malaise, but Stevenson and his crew persevere, growing his practice, hiring more staff, eventually accomplishing the unimaginable.

Walter McMillian - Equal Justice Initiative

'I went to death row for 28 years through no fault of my own ...  Anthony Ray Hinton endured almost three decades behind bars on death row, wrongly convicted by Alabama’s racist judiciary system, telling his incredible story to Chris McGreal from The Guardian, April 1, 2018

Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society | People ...   Chris Hedges interview with Bryan Stevenson from Smithsonian magazine, December 2012

Bryan Stevenson and the Legacy of Lynching | The New Yorker  Jeffrey Toobin, August 15, 2016