When Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson started working on their documentary Deadline three years ago, they didn’t know that George Ryan would become the video’s central figure. Instead they were planning to focus on the history and repercussions of Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 Supreme Court case in which the majority ruled that the state’s arbitrary application of the death penalty qualified as cruel and unusual punishment “in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” (The ruling was overturned in 1976; as a state legislator Ryan voted for reinstatement of the death penalty in Illinois in 1977.)
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While interviewing anti-death-penalty activists like former prison warden Donald Cabana, author of Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner, the pair, based in New York and operating as Bigmouth Productions, kept an eye on developments in Chicago, where Chevigny had lived and worked for seven years. They were aware of the governor’s 2000 decision to place a moratorium on executions after 13 people on the state’s death row were found to have been wrongfully convicted. But it wasn’t until they heard that the death row clemency hearings convened by Ryan during the final months of his term were open to the public and the press that they decided to come here and start shooting.
Chevigny and Johnson taped 18 hours of the hearings. “We were there much longer than the other crews,” says Chevigny. “By the third day we got to know the prison review board and everyone on the staff. We were able to set up the camera wherever we wanted.”
