It’s time for Hays County to adopt a formal plan to ensure innocent people aren’t falsely imprisoned.
This belief – with variance in the exact pathway to achieve it – has emerged as a unanimous concern among every district attorney candidate this season, regardless of political party.
All three district attorney hopefuls have RSVP’d for Lost River Film Fest, where they are invited on Friday, February 6, to take a few minutes and elaborate on how they envision a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) or similar endeavor to explore and fix error-based incarceration.
Why clarify criminal-justice policy at a film festival?
Now in our 9th year, Lost River Film Fest – an exposition of new, independent cinema from February 5-8 – will show the new documentary “A Night in West Texas,” which chronicles a journey for exoneration, launched by a gay Apache man wrongly charged with killing a closeted Catholic priest in the 1980s.
The film is directed by Peabody-winning journalist Deborah S. Esquinazi, whose film “Southwest of Salem” – also spotlighting mistaken murder convictions in 1980s Texas, the case of four San Antonio women arrested amid the Satanic Panic – played at our first-ever Lost River Film Fest in 2017.
Her newest film was produced while her crew was embedded with The Innocence Project, and is presented by Texas Monthly.
The San Marcos screening has an enormous added bonus: attorney Patricia Cummings, a leading national advocate in the innocence movement, will discuss her work supervising the CIU in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office and a rising movement to create similar offices.
We will also hear directly from Alfonzo Salazar and Landon Campbell, whose primary race in March will determine the Democratic nominee for the November general election.
That winner will face independent Kirsta Melton, who is unable to attend Lost River in person, but whose statement pledging support for a CIU will be read for the filmgoing audience. In part, it states “Since 1989 there have been more than 3600 exonerations in this country freeing people who went to prison for crimes they did not commit while the real perpetrators walked free. That’s fundamentally unjust.”
As a nonprofit film society that cares both about film and society, we also urge creation of a CIU – but it must include full-time staff with ample resources to look at original trial cases, police files and see where things may have gone wrong.
This we’ve learned from showing far too many true-crime documentaries that feature innocent Texans falling through the cracks of our justice system.
Hays Free Press readers are welcome to join us for the screening of “A Night in West Texas” and the talk by Patricia Cummings on Friday, Feb 6 at 7PM in the Price Center in San Marcos.
Readers can use the waiver code “HaysFreePress” for a 25% discount on purchase of any festival tickets or badges at www.TheLostRiverFilmFest.org.
Sam Benavides is an organizer of Lost River Film Fest.
