The Innocent Man in Netflix: death penalty for the Innocent

Ada, Oklahoma, 8. December 1982. The 21-year-old Debbie Carter is raped in her apartment and murdered. Five years later, the police of some 15,000 inhabitants believe in counting the small city, to have the perpetrators found. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz are taken in spite of meagre evidence of the situation and in 1988 sentenced: the Latter to life imprisonment, the Former to death. One and a half years later, on 28. April 1984, the 24-year-old Denice Haraway unexplained circumstances. This time, investigators are faster. After a short time they arrest Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot. In 1985, the Suspects are guilty – the death penalty. Evidence? Threadbare. Haraways skeleton is only found a year after the judgment.

Kai Spanke

volunteer.

F. A. Z.

With “The Innocent Man” shows Netflix, a six-part adaptation of John Grisham is the only non-fiction book of the year in 2006, and Robert Mayers 1987 published treatise “The Dreams of Ada”. “If I had ,The Innocent written’ as a novel,” says Grisham, “would not have bought the reader, me the action.” In fact, you may hardly believe what the hair-raising process has made mistakes in the justice system. The makers of the True-Crime series, Ross M. Dinerstein and Clay Tweel, put a lot of effort, all of this in Detail. In this respect, The Innocent Man exudes “” as well as the Genre in the Whole of the Haut gout of the Boulevardesken: Our voyeurism is supported, our indignation fired up, we are thinking about how the world is and how it should be.

the current True-Crime-Boom it’s easy to forget that the flash’s portrayal of crime is nothing New. The storytellers, by the seventeenth century brought terrible news to the year, markets to the masses, were True-Crime-Kolporteure. Reports of court hearings are as old as the press. And novels that begin with the note, a true story based on the loungers, have always triggered a different Thrill than pure fiction. The also Truman Capote, presented in 1965, the book “In Cold Blood”, in which he ausleuchtete the souls of two men who committed a quadruple murder knew.

the storytellers were True-Crime-Kolporteure

in the Meantime, there are a number of classics of the genre, such as Joe McGinniss’ “Fatal Vision” (1983), Jon Krakauers “Under the Banner of Heaven” (2003) or Richard Lloyd parry’s “People Who Eat Darkness” (2011). The 2014-launched Podcast “Serial,” about a High School murder 1999 download his best times fifty million listeners.

Also on TV, such stories gain through the serial to Tell, which is the development of complex relationships and personalities. The effect is an increase in the willingness to empathy in, carefully worded, difficult types, and the certainty that there are no certainties. With one exception: the legal order of The United States – the least of all the American formats can doubt – would be fundamental reforms. In the Netflix produced series “Making a Murderer” (2015 and 2018) in front of a lawyer, as it is for someone must be, to be in America falsely of a crime accused of: “If that happens, then a lot of luck in this criminal justice system.” to land

In the prison, shows up again in “The Innocent Man”, it requires no great effort; to get back out again – innocent or not – only under happy circumstances. Four percent of all prisoners in the United States were wrongfully convicted. In other words: 120,000 people. The makers of the documentation, wondering how something like this can be, and examine the circumstances under which the alleged killers were being interrogated, what the Prosecutor put forward was, what evidence there was, how well certain stuff to keep statements on a thorough assessment, which is the scientific value of hair analysis is to be accorded. The conclusion, this much can be revealed: With the charges, the guilty verdicts were predetermined to some extent. And the police station of Ada might have been a hotbed of Criminal.