How We Made This

This film was made following a trip to Washington D.C. where by chance I happened to come across the office for THE NATIONAL COALITION TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY. The name of this organization immediately grabbed my attention and I was able to meet with the head of advertising and showed him some of my documentary work. I wanted to produce a promotional film for this group that could be used as a public service announcement and proposed writing a script for them.
In writing the idea, I wanted to try and avoid confronting the moral issue of whether or not there should be a death penalty, because it seems that no matter how you try and phrase the argument that morally it is unjust for the state to kill it’s citizens, there is always the strong contingent of people who believe that in many circumstances the death penalty is the only punishment that provides satisfactory justice for the most heinous of crimes. In fact, at the time my own brother strongly felt that there should be a death penalty in the United States, purely on moral grounds.
What I tried to suggest with this film, is that whether or not one can accept the existence of the death penalty on moral grounds, the reality is that the justice system that we have is imperfect, and that statistically it is the underprivileged that suffer, and surely this is unjust. Morally, I believe that it would appear unacceptable to ALL that with the bias that exists at every stage of the legal system, that it is only the poor who end up on death row. Whether or not you believe in the death penalty, it is impossible to justify the manner in which these cases are prosecuted and the vast discrepancy that exists between the types of defense offered by a public defender and that of a highly paid defense counsel.
With this script, I tried to include as many examples I could of these cracks in the system through which the poor and destitute can fall and in doing so would hope to make the argument less about the moral issue and more about the overall unfairness of the legal system and how unethical it is for a system that is so skewered and riddled with such glaring inconsistencies to be allowed to mete out this ultimate punishment.