MovieChat Forums > On Death Row (2012) Discussion > Very moving

Very moving

posted 11 years ago by michelle-halloway
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I have not seen 'Into the Abyss' but "On Death Row' recently screened on Australian TV. When Herzog interviewed Linda Cartys prosecutor and said that he sees her as a human being. Small statements like that carry so much power and bring out the truth. I find the details of the crimes horrendous, but they have not found sufficient evidence for Linda and I worry they are doing a remake of the film' In the Heat of the Night'. To charge someone and sentence them to death with no decent trial is extremely wrong and the practice of capital punishment I think is barbaric and wrong. Two wrongs dont make a right. Killing is never right. I feel I will never forget these people interviewed, I know Jesus forgives but those killing the people on death row will they ask for forgiveness? There have been issues with the chemicals to kill not working properly and the person suffering for a long period as not suffficiently qualified people carry out the execution. There are layers and layers of evil doing in this whole mess.

[–] puirt-a-beul 7 years ago

There are layers and layers of evil doing in this whole mess.

I'm posting a few years on, Michelle, but I wanted to say I really appreciate your post I think you summed it up very well.

Part of the power of these interviews, I think, is that they present many angles of each story, without Herzog passing judgement or trying to give greater weight to one over another. In the end. what we see in them reflects the values and beliefs we bring to them.

I was dismayed by the prosecutor in the Linda Carty story. I felt she blurred the line between her own beliefs about Carty's intentions and the raw facts of the case. Several times she said things she really had no professional right to say. And then there was Carty's alleged accomplice, who was quite happy to throw Carty under the proverbial bus and make it sound like she had been the driving force -- but was he telling the truth, or just grabbing the opportunity to lift the blame off himself?

I found the law firm that was representing Carty pro bono a bit of a puzzle. The one question that Herzog didn't ask them that I really wanted to hear was why they felt so convinced of her innocence that they would invest such resources in her defence? There didn't seem to be any benefit to them (like publicity or PR value) for doing it, so I'd like to have heard their thinking.

If you have a chance to see it, the episode on Blaine Milam is a real challenge to make sense of. Predictably, the prosecutor accuses Milam of being "pure evil", but I just don't see it. Milam seems to be typical of so many of these people in the US, caught in the squeeze between a chronic lack of intelligence or education and the mediaeval superstition of evangelist religion, so I felt it was a sad story.

You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.