Singapore Anti-Death Penalty Committee presents:
DEADLINE: The Screening
Guinness Theatre, Substation
8 pm. Wednesday, 5th April, 2006
Free Admission.
Deadline is a documentary on Illinois Governor George Ryan, who, with 60 days left in office, makes a decision on the fate of death row prisoners. Directors Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson tackle the volatile topic of the American capital punishment system with intelligence, compassion and balance. Furthermore, they capture the extraordinary transformation of one man who holds the power of life and death in his hands.
Deadline is New York-based Big Mouth Productions's sixth feature-length documentary film and both Johnson and Chevigny's second film. Chevigny's directorial debut was Journey to the West: Chinese Medicine Today (2002), distributed by Wellspring Media. Johnson's previous film, Innocent Until Proven Guilty, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1999 and was featured on HBO.
Among other awards, Deadline has won the 2005 Cine Golden Eagle Special Jury Award, the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award, Best Feature Documentary and Best Director at the Black Point Film Festival, Lake Geneva.W!. It has also screened at Amnesty International Film Festival, Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and The Independent Film Festival of Boston.
This screening is organized by The Singapore Anti-Death Penalty Committee, which is a group of concerned individuals who believe that it is wrong for the state to take someone's life. We have organized this film screening as part of our public outreach. We hope to show more people the facts and the myths behind the death penalty.
More about Governor George Ryan...
On 11 January 2003, George Ryan, the outgoing Governor of the state of Illinois, commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners and pardoned four others - Aaron Patterson, Madison Hobley, Leroy Orange and Stanley Howard - who he believed had been tortured into confessing to crimes they did not commit.
In January 2000 Governor Ryan had announced that he was suspending executions pending an investigation into the stateÂ’s system of capital punishment, stating: "Until I can be sure. . . that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate." At that time, 13 cases of wrongful conviction in capital cases had emerged since Illinois reinstated the death penalty in 1977. After suspending all executions, Governor Ryan appointed a Commission on Capital Punishment, which in April 2002 recommended over 80 specific reforms to the system. Its report, however, acknowledged that the Commission's 14 members were unanimous "in the belief that no system, given human nature and frailties, could ever be devised or constructed that would work perfectly and guarantee absolutely that no innocent person is ever again sentenced to death".