Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Wrongly convicted, they sat on death row for years. Extraordinary legal measures saved their lives. A new play confronts us with their nightmares.
Oct 20, 2000 | Erik Jensen says tickets are waiting for George W. Bush at will call for a unique New York production later this month. "The reason we have an open invitation for George W. Bush and his wife to come to the show -- there are two free tickets available, any night -- is because we don't think he has any idea what effect what he's done 145 times has on individuals who were, in fact, innocent."
"The Exonerated," a play by Jensen and Jessica Blank, is a series of intersecting monologues culled from their 40 interviews with former death-row inmates who were eventually proven innocent and released. Like the 88 Americans who were wrongfully convicted in capital crimes and have been exonerated since 1973, the play's 12 subjects ("just like in a jury," says Blank) were freed through an appeals process that left them imprisoned on death row for as long as 20 years.
"Each of these cases was an exception," Blank says. "They were not overturned due to the normal workings of the system. These people were freed because of a crusading lawyer working pro bono or a group of journalism students, with the funding of a university, who dug back into a closed case or an investigative reporter who didn't let someone's story die in the public eye for 10 years."
This is Blank and Jensen's first production together; they're getting married in June. Actors and writers, both starred in the just-wrapped independent film "At the End of the Day," and Jensen appears regularly on NBC's "Deadline." The show's rotating cast of actors will include Tim Robbins, Charles Dutton, Edie Falco, David Morse, Martha Plimpton and Vincent D'Onofrio. All participants in "The Exonerated" are volunteers who Blank and Jensen rallied to the cause. Amnesty International USA and other death-penalty activists are on its advisory board.
"These stories speak for themselves," says Blank. "If people's hearts are open and they hear these stories, it's our belief with this issue that they cannot, will not be able to, leave the theater being adamantly and unquestioningly pro-death penalty. They will be moved to question things very deeply, and if that happens, we've done our job."
Their job is a tough one, particularly should the Republican presidential candidate decide to join the audience.
Since Bush began his tenure as governor of Texas in 1994, he has put 145 convicts to death. Kerry Cook was almost one of them. Cook, a former bartender, was on death row from 1978 (a year after the death penalty was reinstated) to 1997. With a number of appeals pending, Cook came within 11 days of execution -- and saw 141 fellow death row prisoners die.
Cook was convicted of the 1977 murder of Linda Jo Edwards, a college student who was having an affair with her married professor. Cook had met her just once -- at which time he'd left a fingerprint on the doorframe of her apartment.
Three months after their meeting, police stormed the club in which Cook was bartending and arrested him. Because the well-known nightspot had gay clientele, investigators came up with the theory that Cook was a "degenerate homosexual" who hated women, alleging that was why the body had been brutalized as it had. (So much damage had been done that the coroner posited that the victim's vagina had been cut out and carried away.)
On the way to jail, one of the lead investigators asked Cook if he "had wings," effectively threatening to push him out of the plane. At the trial, a fingerprint "expert" claimed he could date Cook's fingerprint to be 12 hours old, to the precise time of the murder. He later confessed that it's impossible to date a fingerprint.
Finally in 1996, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed Cook's conviction, stating that "prosecutorial and police misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset." Before his final appeal, in 1997, Cook took a no-contest plea to a reduced murder charge and was released. DNA tests conducted two years later matched semen found in the victim to the married professor, proving Cook's long-maintained innocence.
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