Witness to Innocence Releases #ImLivingProof Video Series

Witness to Innocence, the nation­al orga­ni­za­tion of U.S. death-row exonerees, has released a series of short videos under the tag “#ImLivingProof,” fea­tur­ing the sto­ries of men and women who had been wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death. The series, pro­duced by film­mak­er Martin Schoeller with fund­ing from the Art for Justice Fund, attempts to per­son­al­ize the dan­gers of the death penal­ty by show­ing the pub­lic liv­ing proof that inno­cent peo­ple are sen­tenced to death.

Eight of the videos are cur­rent­ly avail­able on the Witness to Innocence web­site, with more sched­uled for release. They present the exonerees’ reflec­tions on their expe­ri­ences with the crim­i­nal legal sys­tem, their time on death row, the dif­fi­cul­ties they face return­ing to soci­ety, and their hopes for the future. 

The idea for the “#ImLivingProof video project arose out of a part­ner­ship between Witness to Innocence and Represent Justice, a social jus­tice cam­paign estab­lished by the pro­duc­ers of the film Just Mercy, which dra­mat­i­cal­ly depicts the sto­ry of Alabama death-row exoneree Walter McMillian. WTI Executive Director Kirk Bloodsworth, the first for­mer death-row pris­on­er exon­er­at­ed by DNA evi­dence, explained why the orga­ni­za­tion cre­at­ed the video series. ​“I knew Walter McMillian,” Bloodsworth said. ​“We were both near­ly killed because of a wrong­ful con­vic­tion. And there are 170 more peo­ple like us. Through this series of short videos, we want to lift up their voic­es and show that we are all liv­ing proof that the death penal­ty must be abolished.” 

The series pre­miered with a video fea­tur­ing WTI Board President Kwame Ajamu, who was a teenag­er when he was charged with cap­i­tal mur­der in Cleveland, wrong­ly con­vict­ed, and sen­tenced to death. ​“The death penal­ty is total­ly unfair because it is only giv­en to those who are poor,” Ajamu says in his video. ​“I hate that.” 

The videos take view­ers from the exonerees’ naïveté when first fac­ing the crim­i­nal court sys­tem to a com­bi­na­tion of hope­ful­ness and grim real­i­ty after release. ​“I thought, well, I’m inno­cent, I’ll be fine,” Alabama exoneree Randal Padgett said. ​“But I wasn’t fine.” Florida exoneree Herman Lindsey recount­ed his increduli­ty at being sen­tenced to death. ​“The day that I heard the judge say ​‘we the peo­ple sen­tence you to die by lethal injec­tion,’ I couldn’t under­stand. How can I be sen­tenced to death for some­thing I didn’t do?,” he said. 

Mississippi death-row exoneree Sabrina Butler Smith, wrong­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death on charges of mur­der­ing her son, described the mis­ery of con­fine­ment on death row in a tiny cell about the size of a bath­room. ​“It’s like being buried under­ground with a lid on top of you and you can’t breathe. That’s what death row is like,” she said. She was lat­er exon­er­at­ed when med­ical evi­dence showed that her son had not been mur­dered at all but had died of natural causes. 

Derrick Jamison expressed the joy of free­dom: ​“The day I was released from Ohio​’s death row was like the clouds open­ing and the sun came in,” he said. But that free­dom is quick­ly tem­pered by real­i­ty. Padgett explained the grim real­i­ty faced by many exonerees as a result of his wrong­ful con­vic­tion: he lost his home and his job. New Mexico death-row exoneree Ron Keine came with­in nine days of exe­cu­tion when the killer con­fessed. ​“I got out, I’m lucky. There’s the inno­cent guys on death row who are not so lucky,” he said.

Alabama exoneree Gary Drinkard called for a change in pros­e­cu­tors’ val­ues. ​“I want pros­e­cu­tors to know that it’s more hon­or­able to inves­ti­gate the crime and get the real killer than it is to get a con­vic­tion,” he said. In Keine’s case, the actu­al killer was a police offi­cer who had been told to leave town by the sher­iff so as not to cre­ate an issue dur­ing an elec­tion year. ​“Your con­sti­tu­tion­al rights are only as good as the peo­ple in charge of you,” Keine said.

The exonerees have ded­i­cat­ed them­selves to bring about change. ​“As long as I keep think­ing and keep fight­ing,” California death-row exoneree Shujaa Graham said, ​“I know I’m going to make a difference.”