After Innocence Reflection

      1. One scene that specifically got to me was when one of the wrongfully imprisoned subjects charged with murder by the name of Nick Yarris described his time in prison and how it had an effect on his life afterwards. Nick explained that for the first two years of his incarceration was kept in solitary confinement and wasn’t allowed to talk that entire time. They could do whatever they wanted to him and whatever he said just didn’t matter. He explains how loud the world was, that he could hear the tires on the road not just their engines. The smell, he described, was overwhelming after breathing refiltered air for so long. He became allergic to the world and struggled to breath with the ease everyone is used to. It was funny to learn that he drives a jeep with no doors and windows to embrace the freedom of being able to be outside. The tire cover on the spare tire on the back of his jeep even says, “Eight thousand fifty seven days” which is the number of days he spent in prison. “Family is everything” was the only thing he had to say. Today, he works as an advocate against the Death Penalty and is still waiting for the real murderer’s DNA to be entered into the national DNA Databank.

          2. I was surprised to hear that ninety percent of cases do not even use biological evidence, most often any biological evidence that is obtained is usually destroyed. I learned that there is something called the innocence project and their mission is to help cases similar to these and to get innocent people off of death row. They receive thousands of letters from inmates that express their need to be exonerated and have their charges expunged.

      3. After viewing this documentary, I was left with such a helpless feeling. After these men were exonerated from their crimes, they were pushed out into the world they had been kept from for so long. For some, this was for decades. Nothing is how they remember it and nothing they do will make up for the time they had lost with their families. One man went as far as to say that “it was almost easier in prison than it is out here”. It made me think about how many things we take for granted on a daily basis. Being able to walk outside or even applying for any job we want. It’s harder to think about the fact that among the 150 that have been freed during the time of this film, there are still thousands still stuck behind bars serving time for crimes they haven’t committed. With the way the judicial system works it is just not easy to get changes passed as one would dream of.

      4.  Some concepts in the film that I may want to research or write about in the future circle all of the ideas expressed in the documentary. I would be interested in learning more about how many people are wrongly incarcerated and of that number how much money is wasted housing these prisoners each year? Additionally, how often are eyewitness accounts used as evidence in trials against accused people? In the documentary, this proved to cause a man to be incarcerated for twenty two years all because one woman’s account of what she thought she saw was wrong. The other topics of interest this film brought up was treatment of the imprisoned. More than one account was that the officers are specifically supposed to just break down inmates to confessing, why aren’t these prisoners being encouraged to build themselves back up and become an asset to society once they are released? If they were treated like this would that stigma of being a convict ever diminish in our society? Most of the people exonerated in this film end up searching for a job their whole life and waiting for evidence to expunge their record. I would be interesting in learning how the system works and why it is that they still are stuck with this record until the real convict is caught and put in prison.