"Into the Abyss" poster (courtesy of The Riviera Theatre)
The movie “Into the Abyss” will be showing for its final week at the Riviera Theatre in Three Rivers. In the film, director Werner Herzog follows the impact of a death row inmate’s crime to tell a story about murder and the criminal justice system. James Sanford has this review:
[James Sanford] Last year in the documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” director Werner Herzog turned his camera on paintings that have survived for thousands of years. In his new film “Into the Abyss,” Herzog focuses on things that are far more fleeting; acts of violence, spur of the moment decisions, and human life itself.
Ten years after the fact, that once coveted, now broken down Camaro is impounded in a police lot. It’s been sitting there so long that a tree is now growing inside the body of the car. There’s new life too for Burkett, although he’s serving a life sentence he’s married a woman named Melissa. And she knew he was Mr. Right when she saw a rainbow over the prison during one of her visits. Melissa is now having Burkett’s baby although they have never had an opportunity to actually consummate their relationship. You can use your imagination to figure out how that’s been achieved.
For people like Lisa Stotler-Balloun however, there’s been little to celebrate in the past ten years. Her mother and brother were killed by Perry and Burkett and she’s lost most of her family to disease, accidents, and just plain bad luck in the time since. It’s perfectly understandable when she confesses to Herzog that after being deluged with bad news at regular intervals, she finally unplugged her telephone. ‘I did not want another phone call telling me someone in my family had died,’ she says.
But what makes “Into the Abyss” fascinating and gives it some texture, is the amount of time Herzog spends with people on the fringes of the murder, including Burkett’s emotionally shattered dad who spent much of his own life behind bars. At one point, father and son were reunited and Herzog doesn’t miss the opportunity to pose a real heartbreaker of a question to the senior Burkett; ‘Describe the feeling to me when you’re handcuffed to your son in the same bus?’ the filmmaker asks. The man all but disintegrates before our eyes and tries to make excuses for his son, claiming ‘he had trash for a father.
Death Row News Texas Prison System - News
Yeah, I forgot about Texas, the #1 hanging state. by Ember Location: Haysville on Jan 24, 2012 at 11:43 AM I believe in the death penalty. I have had a loved one brutally raped and murdered then left for dead, thrown aside as if her life didn't matter.
He's looking at death row in a Texas prison where convicted murderer Michael Perry is slated to be executed for his role in a triple homicide in 2000. The case involves the attempted theft of a red Camaro by Perry and his cohort Jason Aaron Burkett and
We once had a sound means of protecting society from vermin of this ilk. . . the death penalty. It is irrational for taxpayers to have to bear the burden of keeping sociopaths alive. They cannot be rehabilitated because they do not want to be.
But when he died in November 2011, Texas seemed his only friend. His family failed to claim his body, so the state paid for his burial. On a cold morning in this East Texas town, a group of inmates bowed their heads as a prison chaplain led a prayer
AP FORT WORTH, Texas — A woman removed from death row after her attorneys found prosecutors had withheld evidence at her trial has received a life sentence for masterminding the murders of her boyfriend's parents. However, her attorney, Robert Ford,
The Caging Of America: Why do we lock up so many people ...
. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.