Arts Listings

There are more than 400 prisoners in the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, rotting away with little or no recourse to the law, no contact with families or lawyers or the governments of the nations from which they came. Tragic as the situation may be, these men are almost celebrity cases in comparison to the hundreds or possibly thousands of wrongly incarcerated men who bide their time in our state and federal prisons.  

After Innocence, a 2005 documentary newly released on DVD by New Yorker Video, takes a thoughtful look at seven of these men, men whose innocence was finally proven by DNA evidence after five, 10, even 23 years in prison.  

And this is just a small sample; for every prisoner who manages to mount an appeal with DNA evidence there may hundreds more without legal help, or whose case evidence has been lost or mishandled to the point where there is nothing left to test.  

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially now, here in California, where our prisons are so overcrowded that the governor has begun shipping prisoners out of state to make room for still more. There are many unjustly serving life sentences under the Three Strikes law, many serving stiff sentences for relatively minor crimes, and who knows how many serving time for no reason at all. 

As After Innocence demonstrates, vengeance seems to be in our blood. Violent crimes can tear apart families and communities, and afterwards the public and the victims’ families need closure, putting police and police are under great pressure to imprison someone, anyone, to put the everyone’s mind at ease. The need can be so strong that we can convince ourselves that we have seen things we have not seen, or that evidence that is dubious or incomplete amounts to conclusive proof. As the film makes clear, eyewitness testimony, usually considered reliable, is often anything but; in fact, most of those wrongly incarcerated in this country were convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony that was later proven false.  

Wilton Dedge has one of the more extraordinary stories. He was locked up essentially because he had long blond hair, though he was nearly a foot shorter than the description of the rapist he was taken for. He then spent 20 years in jail before finally proving his innocence; and yet, he was still not released for another three years as the Florida legal system fought to keep the finality of its decisions from being undermined.  

The complexities of identification only worsen across racial lines. A white rape victim thought she had identified her black assailant in a police lineup and her testimony sent him to jail. When DNA evidence finally proved his innocence, she not only apologized but joined forces with him to publicize the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, the injustices of the legal system, and the organizations to which the wrongly incarcerated can apply for help. When the true assailant was finally found, he and the man sent to prison in his place had little in common but the color of their skin.  

What is remarkable about the men in this film is how little anger they have; they have no need for vengeance, or even justice. Nick Yarris spent more than 20 years in solitary confinement and comes closest to losing control of his emotions, at times displaying anger and exasperation, but this is as far as it goes, though he could certainly be forgiven for going a lot further. But apparently the years of injustice have only instilled within these men a stronger sense of the value of justice and forgiveness. Sure, they’d like an apology and maybe some kind of program to help them readjust (since they are innocent men and not ex-cons they are entitled to none of the programs and benefits granted to parolees). And it might be nice if the authorities would finally get around to the bureaucratic task of actually erasing their criminal records so that they can find employment and housing more easily. But vengeance is not on their agenda.  

In times when we are quick to lock up undesirables, and when those who express empathy for the incarcerated are vilified as America-haters, as terrorism-enablers, or, epithet of epithets, “soft on crime,” these wrongly incarcerated men, martyrs of a faulty legal system, have much to teach us about compassion and forgiveness.