True Story details

As someone who is (and has been for awhile) an addict-in-recovery,I KNOW that often anyone who's addicted tends to be sociopathic. No remorse, and dangerous for this reason to both themselves and others.
Another thing would be that someone who was abused is often someone able to mask an awful lot in terms of their feelings. Drugs help with masking feelings; so does recovery if the prison happened to have 12 step meetings of some sort which she went to. People can get clean and stay that way. They can try to make amends as much as possible for crimes(even such as hers;I know such people) and then there are others who don't. It's an individual thing; some people who are addicts are simply too sick with addiction to ever come back from it.
I hope to GOD she never ever crosses paths with that cretin who plied her with drugs in the first place so he could make a living off her. A shame HE couldn't get the bigger sentence.
Another aspect of this is that recently(pretty recently) they have discovered that the brain (the portion which governs impulsive behavior) is not fully developed until anywhere from the late teens to the mid twenties. That age variable is, I think something else here to keep in mind. This kid had a rotten mother, and when she's turned out from her 'home' she is still, in effect, a child.
Now she is an adult, but one who 'grew up' in prison. I sure do hope that her future does not become anything to resemble her past; any human being deserves a hell of alot better.

I really for sorry for the man who try to help amanda but she end up betraying him in the worst way ever and left his kids without their father.

HALLOWEEN IN THEATERS AUGUST 31

Lindsey,
thank you for your very kind words. They do mean alot. I have talked to some very wonderful people through this board and it does mean alot to me when one of you send me a nice message. My father was a wonderful man and I know I am biased since he was my dad but everyone that I have ever talked to about him says the same. He was very caring and was always helping someone. It was just his nature. I know the movie seems like it wouldnt be true because of the death penalty thing but it was and she did indeed get the death penalty at the age of 15(she might have been 16 by then) I think at that time she was the youngest female to be on death row. Eventually the sentence was overturned but like I have mentioned before, I know she will never get out so I am okay with that. I have pretty much always believed in the death penalty but I am guessing that is because of this. I was only 8 at the time. I do think that the evidence against the person would have to be extreme. I think its horrible that some innocent people are executed. In this case,her charges were proven without a shadow of a doubt regardless of the reasoning she gave..They werent true anyways. There are actually a couple of books with her story in it as well. One I have read was pretty true to fact and much truer than this movie and its not from her point of view, but of course some of it is still *beep* Her sentence was actually overturned because she said some very horrible things to a jailer, she told him that she wanted to cut off and take my father's head with her, and actually she almost did. anyway they said her rights were violated because her lawyer wasnt present. She was such a hateful person and I know I have said most of this before. I just tend to get carried away once I get started. anyway I just want to thank you again for your message. Have a wonderful day:)
Dolly

I do not know all the details of the actual case, and there is no requirement that the movie producers get them all right anyway, as this movie is based upon an actual case. It is not an account of an actual case. In any event, the person in question would have been seventeen at the time of her conviction, so she probably would have been sixteen at the time of the offense. The movie portrayed her as fifteen. This does not seem to me to be a significant difference.

But the point of the movie is valid. You state,

"It comes across as fiction as they give the death penalty to a minor in the film which wouldn't have happened so you know instantly they are portraying her as younger for ratings."

I wish you were correct, but the fact is, this person was sentenced to death when she was a minor, and her case is not as unusual as you would suspect. At the end of the movie, they show titles stating that the U.S. Supreme Court has found the execution of people convicted as minors to be constitutional. This puts the United States in an exclusive group of about five countries which sentence juveniles to death. Offhand, I cannot name the rest, but suffice it to say that we share that distinction with some real savages. The U.S. also frequently carries out executions of foreign nationals in violation of international law and of treaties to which the U.S. is a party. Very recently, the State of Texas effectively said that the whole rest of the world could go to hell, they were going to execute somebody anyway.

In the movie, the events were portrayed as taking place in Oklahoma. Actually, they took place in Mississippi. With all due respect to our friends in Mississippi, the state is sort of a national disgrace, last or near last in just about every significant category, most notably in education. It also has an extremely high rate of executions per capita, I believe second only to Texas, where they hold them on a weekly basis, more or less. In the movie, the defendant's lawyer admits that he is out of his league, and is trying his first capital case. This is no exaggeration. The state of Mississippi provides virtually no funding for the defense of indigent defendants. Paradoxically, some death row inmates receive great legal representation, and the governor is proud to point out this fact. What he is less anxious to point out is that this is a result of the fact that the system for defending the indigent is so terrible that lots of the best law schools send students there to work for free. The bottom line: If you are poor and charged with a capital crime in Mississippi, you are screwed. The system of justice is so bad and so flawed that the imposition of the death penalty is almost entirely arbitrary. While it is not the case in this case, it is a virtual certainty that the state has executed innocent people.

I strongly sympathize with the woman who has posted that she was the child of the victim in this case. I hope she finds it in her heart to forgive the people that did this, not for their sake, but for hers. But I leave that to her and her belief in the Allmighty. While I believe that the families of victims are entitled to great sympathy and support, I do not believe that they or anyone is entitled to vengance. The fact that this country is one of the few in the world that practices capital punishment, and the fact that we administer it so poorly is a national disgrace. For a rich, powerful, and smart country, we do some amazingly stupid things.