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Stanford Report, February 8, 2006 The Exonerated Script

By Barbara Palmer

Ray Mickshaw

The Los Angeles theater ensemble the Actors’ Gang will perform The Exonerated on campus Feb. 10-11 at Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The play tells the stories of six exonerated death row inmates.

Ray Mickshaw

The writers of a recent New York Times article assert, like Dwyer, that the script “took liberties” with its depiction of the investigation. And the Ken Burns documentary suggested that apart from a few detectives so fanatically bent on conviction that they didn’t care about actual innocence or guilt, most of the white people involved. The Exonerated is a heartfelt production of a hugely powerful piece of theatre. The writers’ goal was to reveal the human stories behind the statistics, but in doing so the play also exposes the failings of a system that it’s difficult to believe still exists in the 21st century.

Brian Powell plays the role of Gary Gauger in a previous production of The Exonerated. Gauger is one of six people whose stories are dramatized in the play.

The idea for the script that would become the award-winning play The Exonerated, which will be performed on campus Feb. 10-11, was sketched out in a series of notes that two young actors, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, passed to each another as they sat in the audience at a conference on the death penalty held at Columbia University in 2000.

The conference presented information about death row inmates in Illinois whose confessions had been obtained under torture, which was 'very disturbing from an intellectual point of view,' Blank said. But it wasn't until she and Jensen heard the voice of an inmate, who was calling into the conference from prison, that they became emotionally engaged, Blank recalled. The telephone call lasted only a couple of minutes, but 'we were crying,' she said. 'Everyone in the room was crying.'

Jensen whispered to Blank that the conference was 'fine and good, but the collective group already knew these stories,' Jensen recalled. 'It was preaching to the choir.' So, he wondered, how do you get around the problem of bringing immediacy and emotion to the experiences of the wrongly convicted to audiences who otherwise wouldn't hear it?

Their solution was to bring to the stage the words and the stories of those who had been wrongly sentenced to die. Using contacts provided by organizations including the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, Blank and Jensen traveled across the country and interviewed dozens of former inmates who had been found innocent and freed by the state after being wrongly convicted and sentenced to death.

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Even as they shaped the material they gathered into a script that would become an early version of The Exonerated, 'we literally thought we would be doing it for a few nights in a 90-seat [off-Broadway] theater for some of our friends,' Blank said.

Instead, the play, which tells the true stories of six exonerated death row inmates, was embraced by a long list of celebrities and has been performed hundreds of times across the country. The play helped start a national conversation about the U.S. criminal justice system, 'one that was really ready to happen,' Blank said.

The conversation will continue this week at Stanford during a weeklong residency of the Los Angeles-based Actors' Gang, which will perform The Exonerated on Friday and Saturday nights. The residency of the theater company—which is under the artistic direction of Tim Robbins, an early supporter of the play—is serving as a fulcrum for a series of workshops and discussions organized by Stanford Lively Arts to explore the role of the arts in social justice. The Actors' Gang residency is part of a new Lively Arts residency program designed to more deeply integrate the arts into campus life and curricula.

Jensen and Actors' Gang members will participate in student workshops about writing documentary plays, the arts and activism, and creating political theater. Public forums scheduled during the residency will bring together artists, scholars and activists to discuss political, ethical, sociological and scientific aspects of wrongful convictions.

'What's consistent throughout will be an examination of the role that the arts play in shaping the issues,' said Michelle Lee, campus residency program manager for Lively Arts. Lee, a playwright who received a Master of Fine Arts degree in drama from Yale University, joined the Lively Arts staff in January.

'Historically, there have been many ways in which the theater has addressed politics,' Lee said. But The Exonerated is 'the best example that I personally have ever encountered of the intersection of the arts and social justice.'

The play's most obvious impact came after a special performance held in December 2002 for then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan, said law Professor Lawrence Marshall, who founded Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions. Marshall joined the Stanford Law School faculty last year. 'The evening was very, very pivotal' in a campaign to call attention to wrongful convictions, he said. Three hundred people in the audience were watching the governor, who was clearly moved, watch the play, he added. The following month, Ryan—citing 'the demon of error' in the capital justice system—commuted the sentences of 171 people who were then on death row in Illinois.

'There is something about hearing the stories in the manner that The Exonerated tells them that humanizes the issue and compels one to recognize there are many sides to capital punishment, including the victims of crime and victims of a system that makes errors,' Marshall said.

There is one key point that Marshall hopes won't be lost on the play's audiences, he said. 'As awful as what these six people endured, these people are the lucky ones. These are the ones for whom the evidence of innocence emerged in time.' For every such fortunate one, 'there are several others who are not so fortunate, who linger in prison or who are executed,' he added.

However, the play also has drawn some skeptical reactions. In a Jan. 26 New York Times op-ed, Joshua Marquis, vice president of the National District Attorneys Association, writes: 'Two of the play's six characters (Sonia Jacobs and Kerry Cook) were not exonerated, but were let out of prison after a combined 36 years behind bars when they agreed to plea bargains. A third (Robert Hayes) was unavailable to do publicity tours because he is in prison, having pleaded guilty to another homicide almost identical to the one of which he was acquitted.'

The Exonerated will be performed at 8 p.m. Feb. 10-11 in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. A discussion moderated by Marshall and death row exoneree Gary Gauger, whose story is among those told in the play, will follow the performance.

Other public events will include:

Feb. 8: Truth and Justice: An Exploration of the Death Penalty. At 12:30 p.m. in Room 290 of the Law School. Debra Satz, associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Program in Ethics and Society, will moderate a panel discussion with Jensen; Marshall; lawyer William Abrams, a lecturer in the Program in Human Biology who is working to overturn convictions of two Alabama death row inmates; Craig Haney, a professor of psychology a