Hollywood’s Focus on Lost Innocents

Near tears, attorney Ellenor Frutt stands before a crusty judge, pleading for the life of her innocent client. It’s a long speech: five minutes, 12 seconds of passionate rhetoric on prime-time television, a jeremiad against the death penalty on one of ABC’s most popular shows, “The Practice.”

“People keep telling me, ‘Ms. Frutt, there is a system.’ The system doesn’t always work. In the last 10 years, 44 people have been released from death row for crimes they didn’t commit.” A beat. “The system has jailhouse snitches who fabricate confessions. The system has police lying. The system is very, very fallible. . . . As players in this system, how do we not take that personally?”

Frutt’s eloquence, written by “Practice” creator David E. Kelley and delivered by actress Camryn Manheim in the climax of three episodes, isn’t alone.

Movies and television programs--from the Oscar-nominated “Green Mile” to a half-dozen television shows such as “The West Wing,” “Oz” and “Law & Order”--are addressing the difficult issue of capital punishment, a topic on which public opinion has begun to shift despite its near-absence from America’s national political discourse.

Questions of Guilt

The most important recent film was “Dead Man Walking,” director Tim Robbins’ powerful 1995 drama portraying the relationship of Sister Helen Prejean with a condemned murderer. But guilt was never an issue; the film graphically portrayed the man’s brutal crimes.

The latest scripts focus on whether innocent people wind up on death row.

In “The Green Mile” a gentle convict is executed despite serious doubts about his guilt. In 1999’s “True Crime,” Clint Eastwood, America’s movie icon for law and order, plays a journalist racing to prove the innocence of a death row prisoner. The recent “Hurricane” is based on the life of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the boxer unjustly imprisoned for 20 years.

In the national echo chamber where popular entertainment and public sentiment bounce off one another in successive waves, it’s impossible to know whether Hollywood is reflecting or creating public doubts about the death penalty.

What is clear is that a movie or television drama can reach more people in an hour than activist groups can in a year. And the dramas also provide hard facts and figures, mostly provided by opposition groups like Death Penalty Focus, based in San Francisco, and the Death Penalty Information Center, based in Washington. For example, “West Wing” viewers are told that the United States is one of only five countries that execute people younger than 18 when they committed a crime.

A recent Gallup Poll found support for the death penalty at its lowest level in 19 years, about 66%--a significant drop from a 1994 peak of 80%. It also showed that about 91% believed at least one innocent person is likely to have been executed since the death penalty was reinstituted in the late 1970s.

In a state poll in Illinois, where 13 death row prisoners have been exonerated through DNA testing, support has fallen to 58%, from 76% in 1994.

Death penalty opponents say the figures reflect a cumulative repugnance toward capital punishment, a sentiment reinforced by the exoneration of innocent people on death row. Eighty-seven people have been released from death rows since 1973, some due to DNA testing.

‘Murder Rate Dropping, Anxiety Subsiding’

But experts say it has more to do with the general drop in crime.

“With the murder rate dropping, with anxiety subsiding, not as many people think they have to turn to this,” says Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. “The decline in opinion seems to follow the shift in the homicide rate.”

Activists nationwide say they too sense movement on the issue. Prejean dates it to the release of “Dead Man Walking”; she has spoken to crowds nationwide ever since.

“We’re talking packed halls on a rainy Friday night in Houston,” says Prejean, who had 20 speaking engagements last month. “I couldn’t have kept doing this if I’d found in the audience a hardness, or an inability to be persuaded.”

But death penalty advocate Harriet Salarno said: “The press and the movies are writing about the one or two or maybe 10 innocent people. . . . I pose the question: Do you know how many get away with murder? Where evidence is destroyed? More get away with murder than innocents are executed.” Salarno founded Crime Victims United of California after losing her 18-year-old daughter, killed by an ex-boyfriend.

In Pennsylvania, advocate Mary Achilles, appointed by the governor to help victims’ families through the execution process, says the recent dramas fail to account for the horrific experiences of the true innocents.

“They’re excellent stories, great drama, and these are real human life issues,” she says. “But when you spend an hour of prime-time television and focus on the offender, it has to be hurtful to the victim’s family. There’s another human drama there.”

Smith, of the University of Chicago, says there’s no demonstrable effect on public opinion from the spate of innocence cases. And it is even more difficult to scientifically judge the effect, if any, of popular entertainment on the debate. Any such measure, he says, would have to account for the mountain of material that tends to support eye-for-an-eye justice.

“You can point to a number of cases where a cumulative body of works of art--not just movies, but it could be even paintings--can help to shape popular knowledge about and attitudes toward something,” Smith says. “What’s less clear with the death penalty is, is there as much of this with a uniform impact? Action movies with terrible criminals who escape . . . those are in effect arguments on the other side.”

“Dead Man” director Robbins agrees that far more shows are for than against the death penalty. “I don’t think we’d be in this poll situation without those pro-death-penalty movies,” he says. “Those films set in the streets, action-adventure--those movies say it’s justifiable to kill, because someone killed someone else. That statement is being made again and again, hourly.”

The Impact of ’74 ‘Private Slovik’

But attorney Joe Cosgrove, 43, recalls as a teenager seeing the 1974 television movie that made him decide to become a lawyer: “The Execution of Private Slovik,” about the only U.S. soldier executed in World War II for desertion. Martin Sheen played the title role.

“It was a strange case,” Cosgrove recalls. “Most people would probably now say he should not have been executed. Slovik was not very bright. He was shipped off to Europe. He panicked. . . . There was a dramatic impact upon me to see the premeditation, the coolness, the calculation of killing someone at the hands of the state. That seemed so wrong.”

Cosgrove has spent his career defending people accused of capital crimes. Sheen, who now portrays President Bartlet on “West Wing,” recently invited Cosgrove to play himself on an episode in which Bartlet grapples with commuting the death sentence of a federal prisoner.

Sheen argued for the president commuting the execution; producer Aaron Sorkin and director Tommy Schlamme were adamant that he see it through. The final scene shows the president confessing to his priest after the convict’s execution.

Cosgrove told Sheen that the story line was stronger that way: “Maybe there’s some kid in law school who’ll watch it and learn the right message. They won’t think they can rely on the president to save someone.”