Sunday, May 9, 2:00 PM, Charles Theatre 4

Director: Katy Chevigny, Kirsten Johnson

Cast: George H. Ryan, Scott Turow, Grayland Johnson, David Keaton, Gabriel Solache

Country: U.S.
Year: 2004
Running Time: 80 minutes
Format: Beta SP

When a group of journalism students at Northwestern University found evidence that proved a man on death row was innocent (just hours before his scheduled execution), it sent shock waves through the Illinois criminal justice system. Then another person on death row was found to be innocent. And then another, and then another, until thirteen people on death row were found to be wrongfully convicted and set free.

Governor George Ryan, a tough-on-crime pro-death penalty Republican, was deeply worried by the revelations and set up special clemency hearings for all 171 people on death row. As the end of his term deadline approached, Ryan still had not made a decision on his course of action. Three days before his last day in office, he pardoned four men, and then the next day he commuted the sentences of the remaining 167 inmates to life in prison - an unprecedented move for a U.S. governor.

Directors Chevigny and Johnson use these compelling events as a way to look at the death penalty in the U.S. from the landmark decisions in the 1970s that shaped capital punishment policies into what they are today. As Maryland grapples with it's own death penalty issues, Deadline is an important look at a controversial topic both in theory and in practice.

-- Dan Krovich

Katy Chevigny is the Founder and President of Big Mouth Productions and Arts Engine, Inc. in New York. She is also a co-founder of Mediarights.org. She produced the award-winning documentaries Innocent Until Proven Guilty, Nuyorican Dream, Brother Born Again, and Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America. Chevigny directed and produced Journey to the West: Chinese Medicine Today, a feature length documentary about traditional Chinese medicine in China and the United States. In addition, she has produced and directed over a dozen short-format documentary and advocacy videos (including projects for the American Bar Association, ACORN, the Fortune Society for Ex-Offenders, and the Vera Institute for Justice) on subjects ranging from public housing in Chicago to juvenile justice policies.

Kirsten Johnson has worked as both a director and cinematographer on numerous projects for television and theatrical release. She directed Innocent Until Proven Guilty, a feature-length documentary about the juvenile justice system in Washington D.C. She has also directed three fiction shorts, including Bintou in Paris, the story of a Malian immigrant family living in Paris that faces the question of female genital mutilation (winner of the French Human Rights Award in 1997). She has also filmed extensively for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, shooting over 200 interviews in Paris and New York.