The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. A disproportionately high number of Americans of color routinely become entangled in an uncaring justice system, in which individuals charged with a crime can wait years behind bars before receiving their day in court. Within America, the state of Louisiana has the harshest laws regarding the legal disposition of defendants (only 10 out of 12 jurors need to agree on a finding of guilt, for instance). And within Louisiana, the city of New Orleans has the worst reputation for excessive and abusive police tactics (in fact, the police department was under a consent decree from the Department of Justice at the time this heartbreaking documentary was filmed). Filmmaker Harry Moses’s Guilty Until Proven Guilty focuses on the experience of Tim Conerly, an African American man arrested in 2014 in connection with an armed robbery, who waited 28 months for a trial. The film finds that the district attorney’s office that covers New Orleans is not just gung-ho on battling crime, but suspiciously overzealous and arguably strategic in overloading courts, thereby keeping the accused indefinitely in prison. A Louisiana chapter of the national nonprofit Innocence Project—tasked with freeing prisoners unfairly convicted and imprisoned for many years—plays a heroic role here, but what sticks with the viewer are the faces of men whose terrible treatment in notorious prisons such as Angola has left them embittered and angry. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)
Guilty Until Proven Guilty
(2018) 52 min. DVD: $19.95. First Run Features (avail. from most distributors). Volume 34, Issue 5
Guilty Until Proven Guilty
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