Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Director Liz Garbus talks about the death penalty and her documentary on a woman executed for murder.
Mar 18, 2002 | Wanda Jean Allen was executed in January 2001, after spending nearly 12 years on death row in Oklahoma for murdering her former girlfriend, Gloria Leathers. Three months before the scheduled execution, filmmaker Liz Garbus (who previously co-produced and co-directed 1998's "The Farm: Angola, USA") traveled to Oklahoma to document the efforts to have Allen's death sentence commuted to life without parole. The legal arguments hinged on evidence that wasn't introduced in the 1989 trial -- most important, that Allen, as her legal team contended, was borderline mentally retarded. "The Execution of Wanda Jean," the resulting documentary directed by Garbus and produced by Garbus and Rory Kennedy, premiered on HBO Sunday night (it will also run on March 18, March 20, March 22 and March 28).
"Wanda Jean" comes to American TV at a time when issues of mental competence and guilt or innocence are highly charged. In the enormously controversial Andrea Yates case, the prosecution and the defense agreed Yates was mentally ill, yet she was convicted, and sentenced to life in prison on Friday, under Texas' strict insanity defense standard. Throughout the country, death penalty issues, including whether mentally retarded people should be executed, are under scrutiny. In February, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving a Virginia death row inmate who is mentally retarded: the Court is considering the question of whether such a conviction is constitutional. Currently 18 states prohibit capital punishment for the mentally retarded, and stays of execution have recently been issued even in states where there is no such law on the books. And in Illinois, Gov. George Ryan has said he plans to review the cases of all 163 people on death row in his state before his term ends at the end of the year.
Her goal in making "Wanda Jean," Garbus says, was to show a death row inmate as a human being. "People facing the death penalty are not equal to the worst things they've done ... People sit on juries. And it takes a unanimous vote to get a death penalty verdict. So you hope that one person sees the film and says, "You know, it didn't really accomplish much to kill Wanda Jean."
Salon spoke with Garbus recently about the death penalty, her film and the state of documentaries today.
The legal landscape is somewhat different today than it was a year ago -- particularly with the Supreme Court's recent stay of an execution in Texas and the arguments before that court about whether the death penalty should be applied to mentally retarded people. What do you think the outcome for Wanda Jean would have been if her execution date had been set for this year?
The landscape is a little different. Just the other day, Gov. Ryan of Illinois said he's considering pardoning all 163 people who are on death row in his state ... About two weeks ago there was a case involving someone who had borderline retardation in Georgia, whose jury did not know about the mental retardation. It was a very similar case to Wanda Jean's. And Rosalyn Carter and some others got involved with the case, and he ended up getting a commutation from the governor. So if you look at that and you look at Wanda Jean's case, you'd think, Well, maybe given the circumstances and the political moment right now, Wanda Jean would have had a better shot.
But I feel like Oklahoma was pretty set on executing Wanda Jean. That's just me. Oklahoma in some ways was immune to a lot of things, because some of this stuff with the death penalty was already happening a year ago. It did not seem to have a big impact in Oklahoma. It was definitely an environment there of, "Let's get these executions done," because these folks had been on death row for quite a while.
The clemency board felt like Wanda Jean had killed twice, and I felt like they really believed that she was a cold-blooded killer. They were not persuaded by arguments about her mental capacity. I'm not sure that it would have made a difference for Wanda Jean. She had a bad set of cards, and she basically did not get a break along the way, ever. Not from the first moment of her family hiring a private lawyer and him trying to recuse himself from the case and get her a public defender. This was a case where the public defender would have been a better thing for her. And the judge didn't allow that. Her family was essentially unable to help her because of their own mental issues and incapacities. So she couldn't get a break.
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