Deadline: Producer's Notes

Characters in the Film

George H. Ryan (IL)
During a single term as governor of Illinois from 1999 to 2003, George H. Ryan established himself around the world as a leading advocate for the reform of his state’s troubled capital punishment system. In 2003, after an exhaustive study documenting serious flaws in the Illinois capital punishment system, Governor Ryan commuted to life in prison the sentences of all 167 inmates awaiting execution in the state’s prisons. This was a first for any governor of any state in the union and underscored Governor Ryan’s fear that the flawed administration of Illinois’ capital punishment laws might some day lead to the execution of an innocent man or woman.

Anthony Amsterdam (NY)
Anthony Amsterdam clerked for Justice Felix Frankfurter and then served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia. In 1962, he took his first teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, moving to Stanford in 1969, where he later was named the Montgomery Professor of Clinical Legal Education. Throughout his career Amsterdam has engaged in an extensive pro bono practice. Serving a wide variety of civil rights organizations, legal aid organizations and public defender organizations, he has appeared in courtrooms, as well as (several times) in the Supreme Court of the United States with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In Furman v. Georgia, he persuaded the Court, which later reversed itself, that the death penalty was unconstitutional. Currently he is a professor of Law at New York University.

Stephen Bright (GA)
Stephen Bright is the Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a public interest legal project which provides representation to persons facing the death penalty and to prisoners in challenging the cruel and unusual conditions of confinement in eleven southern states. He teaches at Yale University and previously has taught at Harvard University, Emory and Georgetown. Mr. Bright has represented people in capital cases since 1979.

Donald Cabana (MS)
Donald Cabana teaches criminal justice at Southern Mississippi University. He was a prison administrator at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution on Bridgewater, the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, the Alachua County Department of Corrections in Gainesville, Florida and the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City . He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Gary Gauger (IL)
Gary Gauger was convicted of killing his parents in April 1993. In March1996, the U.S. District Court overturned his conviction, ruling that authorities never had probable cause to even arrest Gauger or to subject him to 21 hours of intensive questioning. He was released in October 1996 by the same judge that had sentenced him to die by lethal injection. The prosecution did not challenge his release. After his release, Gauger returned to farming in McHenry County. Mr. Gauger is one of the main character’s in the Off - Broadway play, The Exonerated.

Lawrence Hayes (NY)
Hayes was born and raised in Harlem and in 1968 became a member of the Black Panther Party. In August of 1971, he was arrested for “acting in concert” at a murder scene of a policeman. Hayes was sent to prison and sentenced to death. In 1972, the Supreme Court’s Furman vs. Georgia found to be the death penalty to be cruel and unusual punishment and was suspended. Hayes was paroled in 1991 and since then has been a spokesman against the death penalty. He has spoken at several colleges and universities and is a member of the international abolition organization, Hands Off Cain. Lawrence has dedicated his life to ending the death penalty and feels that “life should be held above death-there is no excuse or reason to kill anyone, anywhere.”

Cornelia Grumman (IL)
Cornelia Grumman is an editorial writer for The Chicago Tribune. She won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for her editorials on the death-penalty system in Illinois and elsewhere in the United States. Her focus has been social policy issues, the death penalty, education, child welfare, and juvenile justice.

Grayland Johnson (IL)
Grayland Johnson, one of the “Death Row 10,” claims to have been tortured into a false confession by colleagues of the infamous former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. After Ryan’s decision in 2003, his sentence was commuted to life without parole.

Elaine Jones (NY)
Elaine Jones is President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation's oldest law firm fighting for equal rights and justice for people of color, women, and the poor. When Ms. Jones took the helm of the Legal Defense Fund in 1993, she became the first woman to head the organization. In 1970, she was counsel of record in Furman v. Georgia.

Robbie Jones (IL)
Convicted at age 19, he was the youngest man on Illinois’ Death Row. Robbie Jones was convicted for double-murder in a small town in Illinois. He remains close to his family. After Ryan’s decision in 2003, his sentence was commuted to life without parole. He is appealing his case.

David Keaton (FL)
David Keaton was sentenced to death in Florida in July of 1971 after he was convicted of killing a police officer during an armed robbery. His conviction was based on a tortured, false confession. In 1974, he was exonerated and released in 1979 after the actual killer was identified and convicted. Mr. Keaton is one of the main character’s in the Off - Broadway play, The Exonerated.

Lawrence C. Marshall (IL)
Legal Director of The Center on Wrongful Convictions, Lawrence C. Marshall is professor of law at the Northwestern University School of Law. Through the Center and Northwestern’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, he has represented many wrongfully convicted defendants, including former Illinois death row prisoners Rolando Cruz, Gary Gauger, Anthony Porter, Ronald Jones, and Darby Tillis. He also represented Willie Rainge, one of the innocent men convicted in what has become known as the Ford Heights Four case.

Steve Mills (IL)
Steve Mills has worked at The Chicago Tribune since 1994, and for the past five years he has focused on the death penalty, miscarriages of justice, and other problems in the criminal justice system. He is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Maurice Possley (IL)
Maurice Possley has been a reporter for 31 years, the last 20 of them at The Chicago Tribune. His focus has been the criminal justice system, and he has written about prosecutorial misconduct, false and coerced confessions, the death penalty, and wrongful convictions. A graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, Possley is the T. Anthony Pollner Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Montana. He is the author of two crime books.

Donald Schneble (FL)
Seventy-four-year-old former shrimp fisherman Donald Schneble is a convicted murderer whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison by the 1972 Supreme Court Furman v. Georgia decision. He spent five years out on parole running a successful business before he landed back in jail without another chance for parole.

Gabriel Solache (IL)
Gabriel Solache is a Mexican national charged with a brutal double homicide and kidnapping; he speaks no English yet he was convicted on the grounds of his supposed English-language confession. The U.S. refuses to extradite him despite protests from the Mexican Embassy. He was convicted in 2000 and sentenced to die. After Ryan’s decision in 2003, his sentence was commuted to life without parole.

Bryan Stevenson ( AL )
Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of Equal Justice Initiative and Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, has won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color in the criminal justice system. Since graduating from Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, he has assisted in securing relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, advocated for poor people and developed community-based reform litigation aimed at improving the administration of criminal justice.

Scott Turow (IL)
Author and lawyer Scott Turow is a partner in the national law firm of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, and has published five novels, most recently Reversible Errors. Turow served on the Commission formed by Governor George Ryan in Illinois in 2000 to evaluate the death penalty, and he was also asked to serve on boards devoted to the hiring of State Police and the appointment of federal judges. Turow’s pro bono work with death row inmates led to the exoneration of Alejandro Hernandez after 11 years served in jail.