Thursday, October 18, 2012
Video: The Exonerated: True Stories of Innocents Sprung From Death Row - Hit & Run
Reason.com: "The Exonerated: True Stories of Innocents Sprung From Death Row" is the latest offering from Reason TV.
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5 comments:
These two people are very compelling and the play that they worked on sounds incredible. One never considers what happens to the people after they have been wrongfully incarcerated, especially if their fate was the death penalty. There are plenty of stories about revenge and being wrongfully accused but there is never really acknowledgement of what happens to "normal" people. People that don't have the intentions to strike up a revenge plan. I would think that those that have been wrongfully accused would go back into their regular life and society and learn that it is incredibly difficult to do so.
The interesting part of this video was the way they pulled up some statistics regarding a smaller community and racial communities. I didn't know that the African American communities were quicker to get back to normal than say a caucasian community. I guess it makes sense because there was an incredible amount of racism in America and wrongful imprisonment was only one of the many hoops that community had to jump through. The small town affect is also another interesting little fact. I would be curious to know if anyone moved away from that environment after going through something like that. It is certainly hard to imagine trying to move on when your entire community thrives on gossip. Especially when that community can't look at you in the same light again.
Cases like these can really damage a person. It would be good to know if any exonerated people have experienced imprisonment in a place like Guantanamo Bay. It is a great idea to bring this play out and show it to the world. Maybe it will change the way we view the death penalty and how we choose to react to those that were wrongfully subjected to this type of punishment.
False accusation is something most people have heard about peripherally, but it is a difficult case to have a specific, knowledgeable conversation about. It sounds like this play does a great job of bringing this issue to the forefront of viewers’ minds by providing concrete facts and statistics, coupled with true stories from actual victims of false accusation. This last part is key. It is one thing to know that a social injustice exists, even to have numbers backing it up. But numbers are just numbers. As much as we pretend to care, we as humans have difficulty understanding the gravity of 1,000 deaths (for example) until we hear the real account of one of the victims or a close bystander. That is exactly what this play seems to provide. By sharing the stories of “the exonerated” this play allows the audience to put themselves into the shoes of someone falsely accused. Hopefully by truly understanding the facts and human stories of the falsely accused, the audience will learn to cast a more critical eye on our country’s justice system and the death penalty.
This seems like a very interesting thing that this play is about something so controversial and it has had a few staging’s. I hope that it makes people think about what they would do if someone they knew was on death row and then they were released because they were found not guilty. Or possibly if there love one was found guilty and put on death row, but really they were not guilty and you knew that and then they were put to death. I just hope that people think about what should be done about this. Since it does affect lots of people and a lot of their loved ones. I would love to see a staging of it to see how good it is.
This is a very interesting topic. I feel that anytime someone says something about the death penalty other people take it as a political statement. I think that it is important to note the difference between a person stating the facts and a person making a political statement. May people hear about false accusations and innocent people on death row, but it is something that most people don’t think about a lot or believe that there are so few of them. It sounds like the play does a good job of portraying the experiences of several different people and bringing the issue to a place that demands acknowledgement. I would love to see this play preformed.
I remember reading this play over the summer after I picked it up at the bookstore and I couldn't have been anymore happy with my choice. I never truly thought about those who are wrongfully convicted and then released. This play is just one of those plays that leaves you emotionally drained in the best way possible. It gets you thinking about life and definitely puts an impact on people's lives. By watching this video, I'm so glad to know that the playwrights are giving back to help those who helped them write this. It's a great play and a great way to show the community just how these people are affected.
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