Unfortunately, every character but Carter is shallow, mostly because of a screenplay that runs out of time. Jewison sets up a tone of both faith and despair with his black-and-white re-creations of the boxing matches (admittedly modeled after those in “Raging Bull”), his tender depiction of Carter’s unjust childhood and his artful handling of Carter’s pain and fury. But sometime after Carter’s first meeting with young Lesra, his savior, the movie is all action and predictable drama, and it no longer feels gritty and true.

Except, of course, for Washington, who seethes with resentment, anguish and pride. When he leaves prison for the first time in the movie, as a younger man, and swaggers defiantly out into the sunlight, he is the silent figure of an indestructible being. Washington carries that presence with him throughout the film.

From the DVD extras, we learn that Washington lost 60 pounds for the part, that there were actually nine Canadians who worked on the case and that young Lesra is now a successful lawyer in British Columbia. Many of the details — about Washington as Carter, and about Lesra and the Canadians — are typed up on-screen. The Collector’s Edition also includes audio commentary with Jewison, a making-of feature and deleted scenes.

To the next review in the DVD Room

“Splendor in the Grass” Elia Kazan’s romantic classic panders to teenage angst; that doesn’t mean it won’t break you up.
By Charles Taylor [07/28/00]

The Illinois moratorium, imposed by Republican Gov. George Ryan at the end of January, largely resulted from the extraordinary exoneration of 13 men sentenced to die after Illinois reinstituted the death penalty in 1977. (It had been invalidated in 1972 as a result of a United States Supreme Court decision in a Georgia death case.) During the same period, 12 men were executed. All 13 overturned convictions resulted from campaigning by people outside the criminal justice system, with seven cases involving academic and student investigators.

Illinois has offered some of the most dramatic examples of students and academics increasingly questioning the reliability of the criminal justice system. There are legal clinics at many law schools that occasionally take up cases of wrongful convictions, but few focus as intently on freeing the innocent — often with special attention to people sentenced to death — as the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago and the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University in New York. No other journalism school has had a program like the class at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where budding reporters can investigate death row prisoners’ claims to innocence.

Those outside the justice system have accounted for the vast majority of the 85 death row inmates exonerated nationally since 1974, with students increasingly involved in those actions, according to Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. It’s a telling indictment of American justice. “To have a hand in saving somebody’s life for something they’re innocent of is overwhelming,” said Scott Stewart, a Northwestern University journalism student who helped prove the innocence of a man who escaped execution by two days. “But it’s sad and scary that it’s come down to dedicated law clinics and law and journalism students to do some of these investigations. It shows there’s a breakdown in the system at some level.”

President Clinton recently rejected a federal moratorium, despite prodding by death penalty opponents Sens. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Clinton has long viewed support of the death penalty as a key part of his “new Democrat” strategy to be tough on crime. He refused to stop the execution of a mentally impaired convict during his presidential campaign and also signed the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which greatly limited the rights of prisoners challenging their death sentences.

But Clinton may have been trying to keep in tune with shifting public sentiments when he invited Rubin “Hurricane” Carter to a White House viewing of “The Hurricane,” the movie about the former boxer’s fight for freedom. In 1967 Carter and John Artis were convicted of killing three people in a New Jersey bar. After Carter won an appeal, prosecutors claimed in his second trial that he acted out of racial revenge and convicted him again. But in 1985, a federal judge ruled that there was no proof of their theory and that prosecutors had withheld evidence disproving the testimony of a star witness.

Although polls often show that two-thirds or more of Americans support the death penalty, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that many surveys show sharp declines in support since the mid-1990s. When given a choice of sentences, the Center reports, a national majority favor life sentence without parole over the death penalty in murder cases. Also, some polls demonstrate that more than half of Americans agree with academic studies demonstrating that the death penalty is not a deterrent and that there is class and racial bias in its application. There’s also a growing sensitivity in popular culture about the usually ignored fate of death row inmates, from movies like “The Hurricane” and “The Green Mile” to the recently published book, “Actual Innocence,” which chronicles the work of lawyers at the Cardozo Law School to use DNA evidence to free unjustly condemned prisoners.

Gripping stories of men imprisoned for many years and barely escaping execution for crimes they didn’t commit raise doubt even among death penalty advocates. “Telling a story is worth a hundred studies,” said Lawrence Marshall, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago and legal director of its Center on Wrongful Convictions. “What has driven public opinion is the amazing drama of some of these stories — and the way they show the system did not work and that people were saved by complete fortuities.”

Marshall has worked on some high-profile cases that led to freeing death row prisoners, often with Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess. In 1998, Protess, along with students from his class and a private investigator, uncovered evidence that freed Anthony Porter, who was condemned to death for a double murder. Marshall, who had much experience in evaluating death row cases, had concluded that Porter’s only hope was showing that he was not mentally fit to be executed. “We looked and said, ‘It seems there’s a strong case [against Porter].’” Marshall said. “We were ready to dismiss the case out of hand.”

Protess had decided not to take the case because Porter was scheduled to die before the professor’s fall class started. But two days before he was supposed to be killed, Porter’s attorneys won a stay of execution to consider their claim that Porter was not mentally fit to be executed. At that point, Protess and his pupils plunged into a frenzied investigation. Student Tom McCann, now 22 years old and an intern at the Chicago Tribune, had barely thought about the death penalty before he began investigating Porter’s case. But he was intrigued with exposing prosecutorial mistakes.

McCann pored over the testimony several times and mapped out the murder scene, showing where each witness or participant would have stood. “That uncovered loads of mistakes,” he recalled. “Witnesses saying they’re in one place, then jumping to another location without explaining how they got there. Witnesses said Porter was shooting with his left hand, but Porter was right-handed. After a lifetime of watching ‘Perry Mason’ and ‘Matlock,’ [refuting the evidence] was easy.”

The case involved the murder of a young man and woman in Southside Chicago. Police appear to have quickly fingered Porter, who was known as a loud neighborhood tough, and found two witnesses who claimed Porter shot the pair. But when Protess and five students found the evidence lacking, Tom McCann checked trial testimony against the mapped-out murder scene and found much of the testimony implausible. McCann and his classmate Shawn Armbrust got another key witness, William Taylor, to recant his testimony, explaining that police had threatened, harassed and intimidated him into implicating Porter. The students then tracked down the real killer and elicited a confession from him.

“Once you get that involved in a case, you make it your life’s work,” McCann said. “You know you could have an innocent life at stake, and if you don’t [save it], nobody will.” McCann first became convinced Porter was innocent when Taylor recanted his testimony. McCann says the experience not only persuaded him that the death penalty was wrong because it might irrevocably condemn innocent lives, but it also inspired him to pursue a journalism career. He hopes to work on stories as meaningful as the work he did as a college senior.

Armbrust is even more emphatic in her moral opposition to the death penalty following her classroom experience. “The death penalty is racist, biased against people who can’t afford good lawyers and it runs the risk of executing innocent people,” she asserted. Now she works as a case coordinator at the Center on Wrongful Convictions and plans a career in law, hoping to iron the justice system’s wrinkles. “I don’t think a 21-year-old should be doing the job of the justice system,” she said. “But given that the system doesn’t do the work it should, I think it’s a necessity.”

The latest potential miscarriage of justice in Illinois to be exposed by 21-year-olds involves Edgar Hope. Hope awaited execution for 18 years on two separate charges of murdering law enforcement officers — one at a McDonald’s, the other on a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus. For nearly two decades, defense attorney Richard Kling has operated a clinic at Chicago-Kent College of Law that provides students with firsthand experience in criminal cases. Last year Kling was assigned Hope’s case after the Illinois Supreme Court overturned his conviction because of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct.

Kling requested all the files of previous attorneys in the case and put a team of students to work sifting through roughly 20 boxes of material. At the bottom of one box, they found an internal McDonald’s corporate security report indicating that there were witnesses who had never been interviewed. Also, corporate security had been in daily contact with Chicago police Lt. Jon Burge, who was eventually removed from the force for torturing police suspects. Kling and his students tracked down all witnesses, including ones who wondered why nobody had ever contacted them before. Several people said that Hope had never been in the store and another identified the second gunman as someone other than Hope. Now Kling hopes that if he can establish Hope’s innocence in the McDonald’s case, he may be able to save his life in the bus killing charge.

Kate Moriarty, Kling’s student, planned to be a defense attorney; her classmate working on the Hope case, Scott Stewart, had always wanted to be a prosecutor. Stewart, now less of a staunch death penalty advocate but still a prosecutor at heart, found himself making arguments [against the death penalty] as a result of investigating the case. Meanwhile, Moriarty says she is “even more motivated to be a criminal defense attorney and not take anything at face value. I came in very jaded [about the legal system]. This case has made me even more jaded.”

Although a few other schools have — or are now considering — programs like those at Chicago-Kent and Northwestern, they are likely to remain rare. Kling thinks they should be mandatory for criminal lawyers, the way residencies and internships are for doctors, but he realizes the obstacles. “[These cases] are so overwhelmingly time consuming,” Kling said. “We have spent thousands of hours on Hope, and there’s a negligible amount of money we can bill for. [But] I’m comfortable: We can look ourselves in the mirror and be proud.” Protess said he was under such pressure from the journalism school’s former dean, Michael Janeway, that he nearly left Northwestern. “He was completely unsupportive,” Protess said. “He thought students were placed in physical risk and ideology was driving this.” But whether the five or so cases investigated each year result in conclusions that the prisoners are guilty or innocent, “miscarriage of justice cases are a good way to get young journalists to learn the techniques of investigative reporting and teach them how to be better reporters,” Protess said.

When Anthony Porter was cleared, public officials quickly claimed the overturn as proof of the justice system’s efficacy. “[But Protess' students] were so obviously external to the system, something we can’t count on,” Marshall said. “People can’t say, ‘See, the system always works, because there are some gung-ho journalism students who will save the day.’ For every person exonerated, I’m confident there’s at least one other innocent one we’re putting to death.”

“It scares the hell out of me,” Kling said. “Proud as I am of my students, whether people are taken off death row shouldn’t depend on students. We’re the last link of the chain, getting in after everything is done. That’s crazy.”

“Isaac’s Storm,” published by Crown and currently No. 7 on the New York Times Best Seller List, takes place in an era when the field of meteorology was just getting off the ground. While weather-watchers like Isaac and Joseph Cline had a strong faith in their scientific abilities, they obviously didn’t have the technology that could have blessed their forecasts with more accuracy.

Despite his failings as a scientist, it is Isaac rather than his brother who has gone down in Galveston-area legend as the Paul Revere who warned residents to leave before the hurricane raged into town. Nearly two weeks after the storm, the New York Evening Sun noted that “the warnings which were sent out by Dr. [Isaac] Cline are said to have saved thousands of lives along the coast.”

But in the new book’s account, Isaac is an incompetent rather than a soothsayer, misreading the fatal portents in the atmosphere. Now Larson, a Time magazine contributor who started researching his book five years ago, has run into some local resistance to his revisionist take.

Meteorologist Lew Fincher, vice president of the Houston chapter of the American Meteorological Society, thinks Larson has made Isaac a scapegoat. Fincher defends Isaac’s role in the hurricane: “I think he studied everything he could. He was going by the knowledge that they had with them in the bureau.”

According to “Isaac’s Storm,” the two brothers barely spoke after the storm; by the time they both died — within a week of each other in 1955 — they hadn’t been in touch “for years.” But Fincher says that he has read both brothers’ journals and that Larson overdramatized their relationship: “I think that he was trying to come up with a personal conflict to make the book more human. I’ve read a lot on both of those guys, and there’s nothing out of the ordinary that any brothers wouldn’t have experienced.”

According to Fincher, Larson neglected to read an account in a book that was published shortly after the storm, “The Story of the Galveston Flood,” in which the brothers are quoted speaking of each other quite warmly. The cold, stilted tone of their letters he shrugs off as a combination of their very formal Victorian higher education and their military background. On a scientific note, he takes exception to Larson’s classification of the hurricane as a Category 5 storm: “I’d call it a 4, maybe a 3.” (Nevertheless, he considers Larson’s book “a great read.”)

Larson, however, is adamant in his insistence that his reporting is dead on. “There’s pretty good evidence that the legend is not completely accurate,” he said on the phone from his Seattle home. “Most likely [Isaac] did go to the beach and warn some people — but did he warn 6,000? I don’t see how that is possible.” Alluding to documents he found at the National Archives, he said that two accounts point to Isaac’s telling some people to stay in Galveston.

As for the strain in the brothers’ relationship, Larson says that he assumed it was common knowledge and insists that he had no authorial motive to bend the truth: “It would have been an equally good story if they hadn’t have been rivals, but you’ve got to call them as you see them.” Larson says that one formidable expert, Neil Frank (whom Fincher calls “the Babe Ruth of hurricanes”), mentioned the rivalry to him. When pressed for the source of his information about the epic silence between the brothers, he referred to Frank and to an article in the Southwest Quarterly. (Neither is cited in the book as a source for the information.) Larson maintains that he, like Fincher, read the journals of both men very closely and that the tension is unmistakable. According to Larson, although Joseph endured the storm with his brother, his lengthy account of it never mentions Isaac. “It’s either funny or very tragic,” Larson says.

As far as his classification of the storm, Larson concedes the controversy but stands by his reasoning. “Officially it was a 4,” he says. “Having spent two and a half years of intense research on this storm, I’m convinced it was a 5. The bottom line is that no one can know for sure.” (After all, nobody back then had Air Force planes to monitor oncoming storms.) Larson also says that he gave the manuscript to Hugh E. Willoughby, a leader in the field of hurricane research, and Willoughby had no problem with the classification. (“Any lingering errors are entirely my fault, not his,” Larson’s acknowledgment notes, using the standard formula.)

The meteorological journal Weatherwise cited a host of what it deemed factual errors in “Isaac’s Storm,” which didn’t prevent it from giving the book a rave review. Putting it in a class with Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm” and Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” — hugely popular books that have also been called into question for their accuracy - Weatherwise calls Larson’s narrative “reading at its best.”

My husband had been an Eagle scout, and he doesn’t like to be caught unprepared. During the one year that we lived in Los Angeles, we kept a row of jugs filled with water along the wall of our kitchen, in case we had an earthquake. By the time we moved out of our apartment, all our earthquake water had turned a sickly shade of green and smelled. But now it was 10 years later, and my husband, in something approaching a full-scale panic, called me from work on Thursday and asked me if we were stocked up on batteries, canned goods, water, paper supplies, Band-Aids, sterile gauze and flashlights.

“No,” I said.

“Oh my God,” he said.

“Band-Aids?” I said.

“What if a tree branch fell on one of the kids?” he said. “Or worse?”

That night, he went to the store. When he got back home — his grocery bags laden with Chicken of the Sea — he said, “I forgot bread.” In the morning, he went back to the store — this time for candles, fruit juice, canned soup and bread, only he couldn’t get bread because there was none left. Friday night, my aunt called from Maine to ask me to call her children in New Orleans and urge them to take refuge at our house, some 80 miles inland and on relatively high ground. I didn’t have to. They called me. We went to sleep wondering how long we’d have electricity.

At 6 o’clock on Saturday morning — a time that I prefer to be extremely unconscious — the phone rang. It was our friends Collette and Steve, calling from New Orleans. Collette and Steve have three children under the age of 3. “We’re kind of thinking about getting out of here before the storm hits,” they said. “Do you have room?”

“We’ll make room,” we said.

“We’ll call you back,” they said.

By now our own three children were up, and — it being our only day to sleep late — in bed with us. Our eldest son, age 9, had begun to worry about what we’d do if our water supply was cut off and we could no longer use our toilets. “I mean, do we go in the bushes or what?” he said. “And how can we go outside if there’s like a hurricane blowing around?” I was worried about the same thing. But the truth of the matter is — not that I wanted to give the Lord in His Terrible Glory the wrong idea — I was kind of looking forward to the hurricane. For one thing, we’d been in a drought all summer: Our local lakes had receded to reveal a skin of muck, pond scum and litter, my flowers had barely bloomed and our trees were so thirsty that they’d started drinking beer. Plus I’d never seen a hurricane before, and I wanted to see what it looked like.

At midmorning, Collette and Steve called again. Here’s what
they said: “We’ve decided to ride it out.”

“Are you sure?” we said.

“We have a raised house,” they said. “We’ll be all right. Just so long as
the roof doesn’t blow off.”

They gave me courage. I figured that if they weren’t scared of the storm in
New Orleans, there was nothing much to fear in Baton Rouge, except for a week-long loss of electricity and massive, widespread property damage, as had
happened in 1991 when Hurricane Andrew hit. Even so, we filled up all the
jugs we had around the house with water and cleared out our backyard: Our
patio furniture came into the dining room; the kids’ toys — their plastic
“climbing machine,” their trucks, their seesaw, their tools and bicycles and
scooters and Frisbees — went into the shed; the potted plants came into the
kitchen. “We don’t want to leave any potential missiles lying around,” my
husband said.

By Saturday night, as we waited for my cousins to arrive from New Orleans,
even I was beginning to get a tad anxious. Where, after all, were they?
They’d called around 4 to say that they were leaving, and already it was
9. It’s not supposed to take five hours to get from New Orleans to Baton
Rouge. It’s supposed to take one and a half if you’re me, or, if you’re a
college student who has not yet grasped the basics of mortality.
Outside the wind was picking up and the sky, through the trees, was taking on
a weird, pearly shimmer. At last, around 11, my cousins — their baby in
tow — showed up.

“The traffic was pretty bad,” they said.

On Sunday morning, we turned on the TV to learn that all of Baton
Rouge — from the schools to the government — would be shut down for two days.
After breakfast, we went out to fill up our tanks with gas — just in case we,
too, had to flee. But the four gas stations we went to were out of gas.

We drove back home on a quarter of a tank and went out for a walk. The air
was warm, wet, somehow unusually dense. The skies were streaked with a
greenish-yellowish light. All over the neighborhood, people were beginning to
tape up their windows. At one house, the windows were already covered with
plywood. When we got home, my husband asked me where we kept the masking
tape. We didn’t have any. He went back to the store, but the store didn’t
have any masking tape, either. It had already sold out. We watched the news.
We watched the sky. The storm was scheduled to hit before daybreak.

That night, we ordered in Indian and watched a video. By the time the movie
was over, it was well past our bedtimes. But it didn’t really matter: The
entire state was shut down. Up and down our street, our neighbors’ houses,
like ours, were filled with refugees from New Orleans. Their cars, like ours,
had been pulled up off the street, for the “higher ground” of our
driveways. It was almost midnight. I got in the shower and washed my hair.
After all, I figured, I hate having dirty hair, and the Lord in His Glory
alone knew when I’d next have the chance to shampoo and condition.
Finally — just before we turned in — my husband and I filled up our bathtubs.

We were, in other words, as prepared as we were going to be for this amazing,
enormous, 200-mile-wide melee that even now was beginning to pound the
wetlands east of us, sending surges of salty wetness into people’s homes, rearranging the arrangement of earth and sky, and proving, once again, that a
below-sea-level swamp is not an ideal place to build a city. But I didn’t
feel prepared. I felt — in this house full of people — alone. My husband and I
should have known better than to move to a place where they eat alligator. We
should have studied the map more closely, or at least consulted an expert in
the field of water dynamics, or a geologist, or a psychic, before we’d packed
up all our stuff and our three little children and moved to Baton Rouge.
Someone, in other words, should have told us that they have hurricanes down
here. I fell asleep thinking about which of our treasures I’d try to save, in
the advent of flooding: the portraits of my great-great-grandparents that I’d
inherited from my grandmother? The beautiful tribal rug that I’d bought on a
whim three years ago even though we couldn’t afford it? Our wedding album?
The children’s baby pictures?

On Monday morning, we woke to clear blue skies and learned that, though all
of Baton Rouge was still closed down, the storm had taken a right turn and
had slammed into the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, sparing all but the
eastern edges of Louisiana entirely. My husband gratefully went off to work.
My cousins went home. My kids began to whine about how bored they were.
Then, in mid-morning, our electricity snapped off. I don’t know why. There
wasn’t any hurricane; there wasn’t even any wind. Outside, the skies were a
brilliant deep blue spotted with a few high clouds. I figured maybe somebody
in our neighborhood had sneezed hard. Our house, without air conditioning, began
to heat up, because even though it was almost October, it was still, by any
civilized measure of weather, disgustingly hot and humid. I was stuck in an
un-air-conditioned house in a city where nothing was open with three bored kids
and more canned tuna than we could eat in a lifetime. I would have preferred
the hurricane.

“Fuck,” I said.

But I was rescued just before noon, when friends called and invited us to
join them on a picnic. We headed out to a rural park just below the
Mississippi levee, where a stiff breeze was blowing. We ate our sandwiches
and potato chips and then the children flew kites. They ran back and forth
across the field, their kites trailing behind them, under a dome of Southern
sky, on the banks of the Big Muddy. “Look Mommy! Look, look!” they cried.

The wind took the kites high into the clear blue skies.