DNA Evidence Rights Wrongs

Imagine. You’re living your life, doing your thing. It’s all good. Then, one day, there’s a knock on the door and BAM’nothing is ever the same. You’re taken away in handcuffs and accused of a crime you know nothing about. What’s more, you’re found guilty. In an instant, all that you hold dear, all of your freedoms are suddenly wrestled from you based on a complete fabrication. And you have no control. Your whole future is gone. You’re incarcerated, degraded and spend the next 18 years in prison. Your confidence, sense of self-worth, pride, ego all destroyed. No, it’s not Nazi Germany or communist Russia. It’s the United States of America, and it’s today. This is a subject on which movies are made, and 28-year-old filmmaker Jessica Sanders, a Palisades resident, has done just that in “After Innocence,” her feature documentary debut which she directed, produced and wrote. “It was all so random,” says Sanders, who attended Crossroads and then Harvard-Westlake. “I got a call from a friend of a friend who is a lawyer, who had an idea for a film and was looking for a filmmaker. As soon as he told me about the idea, I jumped on it.” The “friend of a friend” was Marc H. Simon, who became Sanders’s writing and producing partner, and had worked with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic founded by lawyers Barry C. Sheck and Peter J. Neufeld that handles only cases in which post-conviction DNA testing can yield conclusive proof of innocence. Sanders had worked on the NBC documentary series “Crime and Punishment” as an associate producer and camera operator and had become immersed in the whole criminal justice world. It was then that she began to question the country’s sentencing process. “I had already seen prosecutors really happy about winning, but not necessarily doing what I thought was right in terms of justice,” explains Sanders. “I saw a lot of ‘high fives,’ and going for the worst possible sentence instead of really ‘seeing.’ I felt that it was more about winning. So this project was a great way to explore the other side.” Exploring is second nature to Sanders, who grew up in a family of artists and filmmakers. It’s literally in her blood. Her sister, Brittany, is an artist whose work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Her grandmother, Altina Miranda, was an artist who produced a film about her teacher, painter George Gross. And both her parents, Frieda Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, are award-winning documentary filmmakers. “All of my childhood was shot on film,” laughs Sanders, “and it will probably never stop.” Sanders graduated with honors in film, cum laude, from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with a double major in film studies and English. Her first job was as a director’s assistant for an HBO film, “Strangers Inside,” about mothers and daughters in prison. Her senior honor film, “Los Angels,” which she wrote, produced, directed and edited, about a girl born with a birthmark on her stomach in the likeness of the Great Wall of China, won several film festival awards and played theatrically. “Once I graduated from Wesleyan, just working gave me incredible experience,” says Sanders. “I worked with my mom as producer on her documentary, “SING!” which she directed. I worked on casting, putting the crew together and how we wanted to tell the story. Working with the director gave me clear ideas on what I wanted and where I wanted a film to go. I love directing.” “SING!” was a 2002 Academy Award and Emmy nominee documentary about the Los Angeles Children’s Choir. After “SING!” Sanders wrote, produced and directed two dramatic short films, “Stormy Weather,” about a man in his pool and “Pool King,” a film shot underwater starring the U.S. champion for holding his breath underwater. And then came “After Innocence.” “When I first started the project, we had no money,” says Sanders, who worked on the film for two and a half years. “It was kind of like ‘I want to make this film and I feel passionate about it.’ And you just fundraise.” As it happened, just when Sanders agreed to do the film, the Innocence Project was celebrating its 10th anniversary in New York City. Sanders got a couple of cinematographers to shoot pro bono and off she went. It was essentially a casting session for Sanders. At the event she met five of the seven men who were featured in the film. Through those men she knew that she wanted to show the larger story of wrongful conviction, and who those people were would reflect the larger group. “At the time, there were 127 exonerees,” says Sanders. “I wanted a diverse geography. I wanted to know where they were from and how they were convicted. Did they get support? What are they doing now? Did they get compensated? So in terms of writing the film, casting was very key. Additionally, I wanted the film to follow a person in prison who was fighting for his innocence.” That person would turn out to be Wilton Dedge, who had to wait 15 years to get a DNA test. Then, the state of Florida opposed his release because his DNA tests were taken five years before the law provided for such testing. After the tests found him innocent, he had to wait still another three years before he could get a hearing. By the time of his release, Dedge had spent a total of 22 years in prison. “We’d call the Innocence Project and ask them if they had anyone who might be getting out,” explains Sanders. “It was a big unknown and we lucked out on how dramatic Wilton’s story was and how we were able to convince the Florida prison to give us the access. It was pretty amazing.” According to Sanders, as youngsters, she and her sister were exposed to a cadre of talented, creative people while traveling with her parents on their projects. And watching her parents work was very integral to her upbringing. “I know that when I was growing up, documentaries weren’t considered to be cool,” says Sanders. “They weren’t like the ‘movies.’ But I think documentaries are very much like a feature film. You have to have good characters and a dramatic story and you have to cast the same way you cast a dramatic film. I had to find people who would work well on film, people who were articulate, so there are definitely similar elements. There are badly made, boring documentaries and uninteresting films. In each genre you have to use your filmmaking tools. I was trained in dramatic sensibility and I think using that in documentaries is helpful and fundamental. That’s how I structured ‘After Innocence,’ and maybe that’s why it’s successful. There is a big, dramatic arc and you care about the characters. In fact, I feel that sometimes the impact of a great documentary stays with someone more than a good dramatic film.” Sanders is currently developing a TV documentary series and has other projects that are in the very early stages. She says that she is drawn to “voices that aren’t heard and underdogs that aren’t recognized.”