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Tuesday, 15 August 2006 00:56 |
With their cameras rolling for seven of those years, co-directors Jeff Werner and Susan Koch have assembled the extensive footage into a stirring document that raises some serious issues regarding the integrity of our criminal justice system.
Rocha was all of 16 when he was tried as an adult in the shooting death of a fellow partygoer and subsequently incarcerated at the maximum-security Calipatria State Prison, on the basis of a questionable, lone eyewitness identification.
While the title subject proves to be a highly eloquent individual who was encouraged to take up writing poetry while serving time, the film is just as much about the passionate gathering of advocates who took up Rocha's cause, led by Sister Janet Harris, the tenacious former chaplain at Central Juvenile Hall who first brought his case to a team of pro-bono attorneys at Latham and Watkins.
Down to their last remaining legal bid -- known as a habeas corpus petition -- Harris and the attorneys give Rocha's case their all despite the cold hard fact that of the about 30,000 habeas petitions filed each year, less than 1% are granted.
Directors Werner (an award-winning editor and frequent Barbra Streisand collaborator) and Koch (an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker) generally do an effective job in telling Mario's story from both sides of those prison bars.
Aside from a couple of creative missteps -- like the distracting decision to have blurred actors dramatizing hearings each time cameras aren't allowed in -- it is an account that rivals some of the best courtroom fiction in its ability to create an undeniably powerful emotional journey out of the real-life chain of events.
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