by David Barnes
Daily Lobo
The documentary "Deadline" tells the story of Republican former Gov. George Ryan who granted clemency to 171 people on death row in his last days in office.
"With this film, we were interested in finding a story that was going on in a contemporary way that would help us to understand what is happening with capital punishment now," director Katy Chevigny said.
"Deadline" will show at the South Broadway Cultural Center on May 16.
Chevigny co-directed the project with Kirsten Johnston.
Although the film is focused on the unprecedented clemency hearings, Chevigny said it was initially supposed to take a different direction.
"Originally, we set out to make a film about the Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia that effectively abolished the death penalty in this country," she said.ˇ
The landmark decision didn't last.ˇIn 1976, the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment.
The filmmaker said the long and often bitter history of capital punishment in the United States may not be fully appreciated by today's youth.
"A lot of young people probably don't even know that there was a time when this country didn't have a death penalty," she said. "So our primary interest was to go back in history and find some of these guys who were on death row in 1972 and see where they were now."
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It was during the initial research for the Furman case that Chevigny and Johnston became increasingly interested in events in Illinois.
"While we were filming material for Furman, a friend called and told me that the clemency hearings in Illinois were open to the public and that I could come and film them," she said.
Chevigny and Johnston were soon aboard a plane traveling to Illinois. It wasn't long before they were engrossed in the drama unfolding around them.
"We got so sucked into these stories of the clemency hearings," she said. "We started to see some really interesting patterns of what was happening in Illinois that we thought shed light on what was occurring in the criminal justice system as a whole."
The filmmakers decided to focus their project on Illinois.
"We thought, 'Why don't we make Governor Ryan's decision-making process the spine of the film itself?'" she said.
Since its release in 2004, "Deadline" has won numerous awards and made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. NBC acquired the rights for the film and broadcast the documentary last summer as part of the "Dateline" series. More than 6 million people saw the film.
