Documentary Witch Hunt, About the Wrongful Conviction and Exoneration of Dozens of Bakersfield Residents, Makes its TV Premiere
The newswire is reporting that a documentary called "Witch Hunt" - a story about the arrest, conviction, and later exoneration of dozens of Bakersfield, California adults for alleged child sex abuse in the mid-1980s - will make its world television premiere April 12 on MSNBC.
According to the press release:
Witch Hunt weaves the larger Bakersfield story through the travails of John Stoll, a construction worker, who while in the midst of a custody battle over his young son was accused of sexually abusing the boy and five other children. Stoll was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison despite glaring problems, among them, a lack of physical evidence, suggestive questioning of the children by authorities, irregularities in the investigation, and overreaching by prosecutors.
Stoll's conviction was ultimately reversed after three Northern California Innocence Project attorneys and 10 Santa Clara University law students proved, after two years and thousands of borrowed dollars, that the methods used to interview the child witnesses produced false testimony.
After witnessing firsthand the dedicated team and vital services provided by the Innocence Project, which has lost the government funding it once received, directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy decided to donate a portion of the profits from the sale of the DVD to NCIP.
"We learned a little bit about the epidemic of wrongful convictions in this country, where over two million people are incarcerated," said Hardy. "If even one percent of those prisoners are innocent, a very low estimate by most experts, that means more than twenty thousand people are looking toward agencies like the Innocence Project for help. Dana and I want to do our part to help them continue to fight for the rights of the wrongly convicted.
The documentary is narrated by Academy Award(R) winning actor Sean Penn, with music by Pearl Jam (whose lead singer, Eddie Vedder, donated the song after viewing an early version of the film).
This documentary "Witchhunt" was enlightening. I absolutely believe that when something like this has happened to the innocent, that at a minimum, they should have a guaranteed job with the county that wrongly prosecuted. A judge should have to have daily contact and know the background of that person. I cried as I saw the frayed flag. This should not happen. John Stoll is really a hero.
I'm willing to bet that over-zealous DA is a republican. Republicans, wake up! Your attitudes today continue to plague the country and make innocents suffer.