Word: erroll
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...THIN BLUE LINE (PBS, May 24, 9 p.m. on most stations). Errol Morris' hypnotically compelling documentary about a Texas murder case helped win the release in March of Randall Adams after twelve years in prison. Now the "nonfiction feature" makes its TV debut on American Playhouse, the series that originally commissioned...
Adams had been in jail for eight years when Errol Morris, an avant-garde film-maker from New York City, came to Texas to make a documentary about Dr. James Grigson, known as Dr. Death to defense lawyers for his consistent findings that convicted murderers were so unrepentant that they deserved execution. In its zeal to help Morris, the Dallas district attorney's office turned over the dusty records from Adams' trial. What Morris found in the boxes was more intriguing than Dr. Death: evidence of a prosecution willing to bend, if not break, the guarantees of a fair trial...
...last week a Texas parole board decided that happy endings are only for movies. By a 2-to-1 vote, the board refused to release Randall Adams, whose plight director Errol Morris publicized in his documentary The Thin Blue Line, which has enjoyed a cultlike popularity since its release last summer. Despite a lower-court recommendation at a hearing last December that Adams be retried, and even though the companion who accused him has all but confessed to the murder, the board concluded that the heinous nature of the crime dictated that Adams should remain in prison...
...Enter Errol Morris. While making a documentary in 1985 about a psychiatrist who testifies in death-penalty cases, the director stumbled across Adams' story. "I was interested enough that I wanted the details," Morris recalls. What he found in the prosecutor's files shocked him. The slain officer's partner, who testified that the killer had bushy hair like Adams', had at first told investigators that the car window "was too dirty to see through." Prosecutor Doug Mulder argued that the defense could not cross-examine a witness because she was traveling. In fact, she was staying at a Dallas...
...younger brother, gave me more than enough reasons to get out of town and join the Marines." His lone consolations were a doting grandmother -- "a great gal, a storyteller, a sanctuary" -- and the movies. "When I'd walk out of the theater, I knew I was really Errol Flynn or James Cagney. And kids from disturbed environments visualize what they feel is the perfect life. Through acting they can realize their fantasies, recover their lost dreams...