Themes: Death Row, Intersecting Lives, Women in Prison
Main Cast: Susan Sarandon, Aidan Quinn, Danny Glover, Brian Dennehy, Delroy Lindo
Release Year: 2005
Country: US
Run Time: 90 minutes
Plot
Adapted by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen from their own off-Broadway play, The Exonerated dramatizes the real-life stories of six innocent citizens who spent anywhere from three to 20 years on death row until DNA testing proved that they had all been falsely convicted. Each of the six stories is related in the first person, using free-flowing flashbacks to highlight selected events. Some critics felt that, by using such A-list actors as Susan Sarandon, Aidan Quinn, Danny Glover, Brian Dennehy, and Delroy Lindo to play the unfairly condemned protagonists, the text of the original play was thrown off balance; this may be the reason why the relatively unknown David Brown Jr., cast as the sixth main character, received some of the best reviews. In the tradition of Schindler's List, the actual people whose experiences are enacted in the film show up on camera for the final scene. Directed by veteran Broadway and Hollywood actor Bob Balaban (Seinfeld, A Mighty Wind), The Exonerated was produced for the Court TV cable channel, and was first broadcast on January 27, 2005. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
David Brown, Jr. - Robert; Rob Bogue - Doyle; Bobby Cannavale - Jesse; Johanna Day - Sandra; Erik Jensen - Jeff; Katherine Leask - Sue; Grainger Hines - Prosecutor; Chuck Montgomery - Defense Attorney
Credit
Bob Balaban - Director, Andy Keir - Editor, Greg Schultz - Executive Producer, David Robbins - Composer (Music Score), Jessica Blank - Producer, Erik Jensen - Producer, Steven Tabakin - Producer, Jessica Blank - Screenwriter, Erik Jensen - Screenwriter
The Exonerated is a film that dramatizes the stories of six people who had been wrongfully convicted of murder, but were later exonerated and freed after varying years of imprisonment, where many were subjected to further brutality and degradation. It was based on a play of the same name written by Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank and first aired on the former CourtTVcable television network on January 27, 2005.
Actors played the roles of the five men and one woman. The script was based on the experiences of the exonerees as well as court records and media accounts. After a successful national tour, a film version directed by Bob Balaban was produced by Radical Media and sold to TimeWarner, Inc., the parent company of CourtTV.
Blank, who is married to Jensen, got the idea for the play when she moved from Minneapolis, Minnesota to New York City. She and Jensen attended a conference about the death penalty and listened to stories about wrongful convictions and confessions gained via torture, threats and deception. The couple spent the summer of 2000 interviewing exonerees throughout the United States and adapted the stories of six people into a script.
The play was first presented in New York City; the final performance was in Minneapolis in 2002.
Kerry Max Cook: Convicted of murdering a neighbor in Texas in 1977; exonerated in 1997. [1]
Gary Gauger: Convicted of murdering his mother and father in Illinois in 1993; exonerated in 1996. [2]
Robert Earl Hayes: BlackFlorida racetrack worker convicted of murdering a white woman in 1990; exonerated in 1997. [3] In 2004, the real Robert Hayes plead guilty to manslaughter and arson in a 1987 rape and murder in New York. He is now serving 15 to 45 years. He is also the prime suspect in rapes in Delaware and New Jersey. [4]
Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs: Convicted, along with common law husband, Jesse Tafero, and his friend, Walter Rhodes, of murdering a Florida state trooper and a visiting Canadian officer in 1976; plead no contest and was released in 1992. [5] Tafero was wrongfully executed in 1990.
David Keaton: Convicted of murdering a Florida police officer in 1971; exonerated in 1973. [6]
Delbert Tibbs: Black Florida man convicted of murdering a white man and raping his girlfriend in 1974; exonerated in 1976. He was eventually freed in 1979 after serving time for an unrelated charge. [7]
David Brown, Jr. was the only member of the cast to have appeared in the stage version.
Aidan Quinn reprised his role as Kerry Max Cook in the The Exonerated's staging at the Dublin Theatre Festival in Dublin, Ireland in October, 2006 as well as the stage version in New York City.
David Soul took over the role of Gary Gaugher for several performances in Dublin, Ireland in October, 2006.
