If all lives mattered, we wouldn't have to say black lives matter

Walter Scott.  Unarmed.  Shot in the back.  Killed.  

Samuel DuBose.  Unarmed.  Shot in his car.  Killed.

Errol Garner. Unarmed.  Allegedly selling loosies. Put in a chokehold.  Killed.  

In case you forgot.  If you somehow missed the video.

And that's before the black screen, the title in white, underlined in red.  The colors telling the story: Black.  White.  Blood.

Michael Brown.  Tamir Rice.  Trayvon Martin.  Freddie Gray.

The first chapter, "Unarmed," focuses on those cases as exemplars.  Here.  Watch the video.  Listen to Michael Brown's mother and Tamir Rice's father.  See the confusion.  The anguish.  

Listen to Benjamin Crump.

There's this notion that the laws and legal proceedings have to be fair.

Yeah a notion.  Lovely idea that.  But as civil rights attorney Lisa Bloom says, 

There has to be accountability.

You know how much of that there's been.

The second chapter, "Black on Black Crime," looks at efforts in the communities.  Not by the cops, not by the government, by the people.  Women of Watts, for instance.

And the good cop, the African American Deputy Police Chief in LA who wants to work with the people, and to investigate what's been ignored.  He promises.  He takes notes.  He seems sincere. And then . . . ?  

Yeah, I don't know, either.

The third chapter, "Legal System," starts with Tom Mesereau and his Free Legal Clinic.  Mostly, there's US District Judge Otis Wright, II.  He's giving a talk, explaining how the feds work, how the DEA runs their scams which is how the prisons get filled with the wrong people.

So these doofuses who thought they were gonna get rich are gonna do 15 years. 

Not because there were any drugs.  Nothing's taken off the street.  Nobody's safer.  But the feds know that they can make it work by targeting. . . .

You've accomplished nothing.  Except to demonstrate that poor people, stupid poor people, will jump at the chance of making some easy money.

It's realpolitic.  

The film's not perfect.  The second chapter lacks focus and feels too much like an interruption, a sop to those who'd see the whole as too political, too polemical.  And yeah, it oversimplifies and probably assumes too much, believes too much.  

But is political.  It is polemical.  It's intended to be.  Those are features, not flaws.

Dr. Melina Abdullah, an organizer of Black Lives Matter, serves to frame the film.  If there's a moral center, it's she.  Near the beginning she cuts to the chase.

If all lives mattered, we wouldn't have to say black lives matter. 

When Justice Isn't Just may not be perfect, but it's got real force.


WHEN JUSTICE ISN'T JUST - OFFICIAL TRAILER from First Run Features on Vimeo.

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My thanks to First Run Features for providing me with a screener.

Severe and Comfortless and Beautiful

My sister spent the last few weeks of her life in a hospice unit in a busy urban hospital.

The staff were friendly enough, and they did what they could to make her comfortable and ease her physical pain.  She had lots of visitors.  She carried on with her work as best she could.

It was horribly depressing.  Not just because she was dying.  But because it was, in every way, a damned hospital.  Which is exactly how it looked and felt.  The staff were hospital people, nurses and orderlies and nutritionists and doctors and clergy who stopped in when called (almost never by her) or when it was time on their rounds because they were nurses and orderlies and nutritionists and doctors and clergy and they had other duties on the parts of the floor that weren't in the hospice unit and there was all the record keeping and the . . . . 

And, as I said, it looked like a fucking hospital room, with all that entails, and none of which is cheery, no matter what.  Hospice unit be damned.

So my initial reaction, just a few minutes into watching Edgar Barens' (Oscar nominated - and deservedly so) documentary following the last days of Jack Hall in an Iowa hospice was to note the remarkable irony that the hospice unit in that film seemed far nicer.  The room was brighter and cheerier, the staff more obviously caring and attentive and focused not just on Jack's medical care but on Jack, on him, as a person.

Jack's 83.  He had a heart attack in 2001 and hasn't been the same since.  After a bout of pneumonia, his breathing falters.  He can barely get across a room.  Speaking leaves him unable to breathe.  Hell, he's dying - which doesn't stop him from having a cigarette at one point.  But by then, why not?

He's also a decorated veteran from WWII, and a survivor (yes, that's a proper use of the word) of the Nazi POW's death march from the Russian front to the American front.  

He's also, and (here I get to the "remarkable irony" part) a prisoner.  Iowa State Penitentiary. Maximum security.  Locked up for 21 years.  For murder.  And the hospice is in that maximum security prison.  It's staffed by a prison nurse and, more importantly, by some of Jack's fellow prisoners.  Black guys. Themselves serving life sentences.  In the same maximum security prison as Jack (who was, his son tells us, a "segregationalist").

Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall is nominally about Jack, and substantively about the very idea of a hospice program in prison, what it's really about, what makes you wail and cry - especially when (spoiler alert) Jack dies, is the other prisoners.

It's the ones who made the curtains over the window and the cabinet Jack's TV sits on.  It's the ones who tack Jack's photos on the wall facing his bed.  It's the ones who lift him into the wheelchair and then into the ambulance when he goes to the hospital. The ones who change his sheets and shave him and wash him.  

Who hold his hands.  And who, when he breathes his last, hold each others' hands over his body and pray together.

 --Excuse me, I had to pause for a minute to wipe away some tears even as I type this --

Whoever they are, whatever they did . . . .

Barens' camera takes it all in.  Day by day.  He has Jack speak - not surprisingly, his words are somewhat self-serving, acknowledging while at least half attempting to justify.  One of Jack's son's is there, visiting regularly.  Talking about the quality of their relationship - developed only after Jack had been in prison for 8 years.

Jack is, ultimately, pitiful.  You can't help but feel for him; Barens sees to that.  But it keeps coming back to the others.  The ones who take care of him and care for him.  Who tell him, finally, to let himself go.  Who zip up the body bag, and then unzip so the prison guard can be sure it's the dead guy leaving at the end and not some ringer working an escape.

The camera work is steady.  Close-ups when the person is speaking to it.  More distant (two shots or further) when we're to observe.  We meet Jack with several day's growth of beard as he speaks to the camera and tells his version of the story.

Well, my name is George William Hall, nickname Jack. Me and my son was-- younger son was livin' in Quincy. That's when the old boy got him on dope. He was about 14 years old. And he finally hung himself. And one day, this dope dealer was braggin' about how he made his money. He didn't make no more. I stopped him. So I got life up here. That was 21 years ago. I'll get outta here one of these days, in a box.

We see Jack being shaved, and clean-shaven.  Close up on the face as he speaks.  So to the men who care for him, bad teeth (missing teeth) but soft-spoken, gentle in manner.

There's some pedantry when the camera steps back and on-screen text tells us that 20 percent of the inmates in our prisons are elderly, that 100,000 will die mostly alone, in their cells, over the next decade.  Barens doesn't add that this is a change, that increasingly harsh sentencing over the last 30 years or so has been turning prisons into geriatric wards.  He doesn't need to.  

The question he asks isn't how we got here.  It's what to do now.  And he shows us a compelling answer.  

Of course, the answer raises its own question.  Just what's the point of this status quo?

"In everything that can be called art," Raymond Chandler wrote, "there is a quality of redemption."

I've quoted that often in this blawg. Edgar Barens shows it to us in Prison Terminal.

* * *

Prison Terminal is an HBO Documentary, available on HBO (or HBO Now - which offers 30 day free access (as a trial - they want you to pay after that) through March of this year.

My thanks to Edgar Barens for making the film available to me.  He asks (and who am I to refuse) that I give the film's website, which I did with a link the first time I named it, and also his twitter feed (whatever that is, I don't twit):  @prisonterminal

* * *

The title of this post is taken from Mary Oliver's poem "Snowy Night." 

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed
an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

Angel Cordero - Coming Home

It's all supposed to be hunky dory.  

You're 25 years old.  Convicted, sentenced to prison for attempted murder, a crime you insist you didn't commit.  Spend 13 years locked up.  Then get released.  Now you're 38.  Not exonerated.  Not apologized to.  Just released.  Have a nice life.  And stay out of trouble 'cause you're still on paper and if you don't play by the rules we'll yank you back.

It's all good now.  Oh, sure, someone will have to teach you what a smart phone is - and how to text. But hey, you go back home and have a beer.  Hug the wife you married while in prison.  Life is good.

Of course, it's not that easy.  Not even with a supportive family that understands, that knows, you were railroaded.  Not even then.

Meet Angel Cordero.

Coming Home is the story of his return after 13 years, back to the streets of Brooklyn, back to his family.  And back to his daughter.

Sarah was 3 when Angel was sent away.  She's 16 when he gets out.  He's missed her life.  And she knows it.  More, she resents it.  

Who are you? Leave me alone  I don't need you.  I don't want you.

But 

You're all I thought about.  You're what kept me going.  13 years it was just to get back to you.  I love you!

She goes to Florida.  He breaks parole to go see her there and give her the birthday present he bought for her.

And all the time he's trying to adjust.  He meets Dario Rodriguez, the man who basically framed him. Who confessed - though of course confession by the actual bad guy commonly isn't enough.  As it wasn't here.  

Their meeting is surprisingly gentle, not confrontational.  Two no-longer-young men, sad, tired. Victim and victimizer.  Regrets certainly, but little rancor.  Angel understands.  So, sadly, does Dario.

Coming Home is a documentary.  Angel Cordero's story is real.  It's warm and joyous.

And it's heartbreaking.  

It won Best Irish Feature Documentary and Amnesty International's Best Human Rights Feature Documentary at the Galway Film Fleadh last year and played last week at DOC NYC, the New York Documentary Film Festival.  It's not likely to be playing at your neighborhood multiplex, but if you get a chance, it's worth your time.

http://www.welcomehomepictures.com/

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My thanks to the promoters for sending me a screener.

Into the Abyss - A Review

I was going to write another post about the Rule of Law and the Law of Rule.  I was going to talk about the USA Patriot Act and John Yoo and waterboarding and drone strikes and secret memos and about the theory of what's been called the "Unitary Executive" and how it can get really nutty.  And maybe I'll do that one of these days.

But then I went and saw Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's extraordinary documentary film.

Begin with gurney and a couple of bibles - one in English and one in Spanish.

Then a field of crosses.  A graveyard in Texas for those, a special one.  Here lie the remains of those the state killed.  Not all of them.  Just those who had nobody to claim the body.  And there, in front of this 21st Century boot hill, crosses behind him, stands the Rev. Richard Lopez, chaplain to the condemned.

The camera simply focuses on him as he speaks.  He tells of saving the life of a squirrel on a golf course by stopping his golf cart before running it over.  And he cries as he acknowledges that he cannot do the same for those whose ankle he holds as they are killed.  He doesn't know why God allows the death penalty he says in answer to a question from Herzog.  But he knows it's wrong.

Into the Abyss is an examination murder in the context of a single, horrible crime in Conroe, Texas, a small city north of Houston.  That's true, false, and misleading all at once, so I should explain.

In October 2001, Sandra Stoler, her son Adam, and Adam's friend Jeremy Richardson were brutally murdered by Jason Burkett and Michael Perry (or one of them) in order, it appears, so that they (or one of them) could steal Sandra's red Camaro.  Perry and Burkett were captured after a gun battle in a parking lot.  Burkett pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison which will make him eligible for parole (not likely to get it, but eligible) after 40 years in prison.  Perry was put to death last year.

Herzog gives us often gruesome (yet oddly poignant in its quotidian detail) video from crime-scenes and shopping center cut with explanations by a lieutenant who was there and investigated the crimes explaining what happened.  Interwoven with that footage are the interviews that make the heart of the film.  With steady camera focused on the subject, Herzog speaks with those who are left.  

• He speaks with members of the families of the crimes' victims.

• There's Lisa Stotler-Balloun who talks of her love for her mother and brother and says that while she didn't much want to watch Perry being killed, but found that when he died a "great weight" was lifted from her.
  There's Charles Richardson who has tattoos of teardrops by his left-eye in memory of his dead brother and his dead sister.

• He speaks with Burkett, who claims to have been only tangentially involved.
• He speaks with Perry, just 8 days before he was killed by the state, and who claims to have had no real involvement at all.
• He speaks to members of their families.

• There's Jason Burkett's father doing life for murder and quite sure he and his son will both die in prison.  He seems to have matured, to care.  He blames himself for what his son did, for h
  There's Jason Burkett's wife, who met and married him since he went to prison and who is, somehow (she's coy about the details, but they're not hared to figure out), pregnant with his child despite the fact that they are allowed only to hold hands on her visits to him.

• And he speaks with Fred Allen, for 125 killings he was captain of the Texas execution team.  It was his job to strap down the condemned man's right leg.

And the camera again pans over the crosses.  Each cross bears an inmate number.  None, as Rev. Lopez told us, has a name.

If Texas dehumanizes, Herzog humanizes.

Herzog has a point of view.  He's unalterably opposed to capital punishment, and the film doesn't shy away from that perspective.  But it's no mere polemic.

These men and women, the living and the dead, victims all though not equivalent in their victimization, are Herzog's subject.  His unwavering camera never loses focus.  We never see Herzog himself though we hear his soft voice as he asks clear, hard, probing questions of his subjects who speak of love, loss, pain, joy.  And continually of God.  He lets them speak.  He listens.

It's said that he met each of his subjects only once, on the day he filmed them.  Once really was enough. 

The film's full name is Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life.  And it is that.

Into the Abyss tells of a crime and its consequences.  The particular crime, the particular consequences, are examined in detail.  But as Herzog hones in on those details, he captures the universal.

Tomorrow morning, the State of Ohio intends to murder Reginald Brooks.  The details are different.  The story's the same.

Randall Dale Adams, Rest in Peace

Randall Dale Adams - Innocent

David Ray Harris - Guilty

That's the mug shot of Randall Dale Adams.  Charged in the 1976 shooting death of Robert Wood, officer in the Dallas Police Department.  Sentenced to die.  Imprisoned for 12 years.  Freed when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a writ and ordered a new trial based on perjured testimony at Adams's trial and on the prosecutor's lying to the court and defense counsel to conceal the perjury.  Rather than have a new trial at which Adams would pretty clearly be acquitted (since by then it was pretty well established that it was 16-year-old David Harris (on death row himself by then, for another killing) not Adams, who murdered Officer Wood.

The evidence that Adams was innocent and Harris guilty was really developed by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line.

It's difficult, I think, to overestimate the importance of that film.  I'm not speaking cinematically, though I could be.  

Janet Maslin, reviewing it for the NY Times, wrote that

Mr. Morris's film is both an investigation of the murder and a nightmarish meditation on the difference between truth and fiction, an alarming glimpse at the many distortions that have shaped Mr. Adams's destiny.

Both Maslin and Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, called it a "reverie."  And it won whole bunches of awards, detailed in Wikipedia (notes deleted, links retained):

The Thin Blue Line won Best Documentary honors from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Kansas City Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, and the National Society of Film Critics. Morris himself won an International Documentary Association Award, an Edgar Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant (1989). The film was marketed as "nonfiction" rather than as a documentary which disqualified it from being considered in that category for an Academy Award.

But the film's cinematic importance isn't what I'm talking about.  I'm not even talking about the fact that Morris's detective work and the film (closing as it does with what is, essentially, David Harris's confession*) are largely responsible for freeing an innocent man from prison.  That was of overriding importance to Adams, of course, and it's a great feat, but it's not that fact.

Instead, it's this.

There was some crime fiction, a few movies, an episode of The Adventures of Superman (the old George Reeves TV series), other odds and ends.  What there wasn't was any sort of broad-based understanding that our criminal justice system made serious mistakes.  Oh, there were questions about Sacco and Vanzetti and Bruno Richard Hauptman and the Rosenbergs, but those were understood to be abberations.  And they were all in the past.  We'd fixed all that.  We were better now.

And then, suddenly, The Thin Blue Line came out.

Morris laid out the evidence and showed things couldn't have happened as the state claimed at trial.  He got the witnesses to say, on camera, that they lied.  And why.  And most tellingly, he had, at the end of the film, this exchange with David Harris.

Morris:  "Is Randall Adams an innocent man?"
Harris:  "I'm sure he is."
Morris: "How can you be sure?"
Harris:  "Because I'm the one that knows."

Damn. Cinematically powerful.  Starkly compelling.  Coldly horrific.

But more, The Thin Blue Line was essentially irrefutable evidence that the system wasn't fixed, wasn't perfect.

Prosecutors cheated and the system didn't catch it.  Witnesses lied, and the jury didn't figure it out.

Errol Morris took our innocence.  And made the issue of innocence real for a generation.

Adams moved to Ohio when he got out of prison.  He spoke out some.  He litigated some.  At one point it looked like we might end up using him as a defense witness in a capital trial in Texas, although that didn't happen.

He died, it turns out, on October 30 last year.

I missed it.  My excuse is that the NY Times did, too.  The Times just corrected that oversight with a moving obituary.

Randall Dale Adams came within three days of execution at one point, but we didn't kill him. Now he's dead.

The Thin Blue Line is still there for us.