Death Penalty
This project is tentatively titled Electrifying Punishments, a one-hour video that will examine the social, legal, and political factors surrounding the history of the electric chair. Using interviews with academic experts, images from historical archives, and dramatizations of events, the video will tell the intriguing story of the electric chair, from the debates over its introduction in the late 1880s through the legal challenges to its continued use in the 2000s.
Electrifying Punishments explores the hope Americans placed in technology, the battle between Edison and Westinghouse over whose dynamos would supply the "executioner's current", the grim insights of an executioner who electrocuted 387 felons, and the challenges abolitionists raised to the use of capital punishment. By placing questions of cruelty, utility, fairness, and mistake in their specific historical context, the video will give viewers the tools to understand and debate the complexities of capital punishment today.
Update, July 2007:
With the controversies concerning the electric chair now expanded to lethal injection, the scope of the video has broadened and we hope include these new issues. Also, this is to be one part of a trilogy on Corrections Issues that will also include an update and expansion of our Eastern State Penitentiary and a video on restorative justice.
This project is waiting for funding to start production.