(The script is by Geoffrey Fletcher, Oscar winner for Precious.) In the early 1990s, in rural Texas, Cameron Todd Willingham was accused of murdering his three very young daughters in a house fire that investigators concluded was arson specifically targeting the children Willingham, the only other person in the house at the time, was convicted and sentenced to death based on allegedly scientific evidence as well as his own sketchy past, which included domestic violence, a public perception that the kids were cramping his loser lifestyle, and an affinity for heavy-metal music and its grim trappings. This one is based on true events, and spun off a 2009 New Yorker article by David Grann, which you can read online.
MY DAYS OF MERCY FULL MOVIE TRIAL
Playing on around 100 screens in the US - that’s not tiny, but nowhere near wide, either - is Trial by Fire, an earnest, old-fashioned social-justice drama that focuses on the death penalty from the “what if we execute an innocent person?” angle. Both are only small releases anyway, and unlikely to make much of a splash. It’s probably only a coincidence that two new movies about capital punishment in America have arrived, one each on either side of the Atlantic. Though maybe it’s only my perception that movies have stepped back from confronting this issue: the death penalty has never really been a major pop-culture concern.
As a social-justice cause, putting an end to capital punishment has been a bit backburnered in the Trump era - in pop culture, I mean plenty righteous real-life SJWs have continued to fight the good fight in this regard. That’s… not great company for the supposed (if self-declared) global bastion of freedom and enlightenment.
I’m not sure if many Americans realize what an aberration it is that the United States still regularly executes its own citizens.
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