Film Review: Scenes of a Crime

<a href="http://scenesofacrime.com/">Scenes of a Crime</a>

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Scenes of a Crime

NEW BOX PRODUCTIONS

86 minutes

When Adrian Thomas slams that binder to the floor, we know he’s toast. We’ve just seen excerpts from a 10-hour police interrogation where he not only confesses to killing his infant son but actually reenacts the crime. But wait: Could he have simply been acting out what the detectives said he’d done? Scenes of a Crime is a gripping study of how one homicide suspect is cajoled, soothed, threatened, and lied to in pursuit of a prosecutorial money shot. Once an exhausted and emotionally broken Thomas provides it, it’s clear that all the physical evidence in the world won’t save him. “False confession is probably the second leading cause of miscarriages of justice,” explains Richard Ofshe, an expert on false memory. “Juries don’t understand why an innocent person would confess.”

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It’s risky, but also unavoidable: A full one-third of the dollars that we need to pay for the journalism you rely on has to get raised in December. A good December means our newsroom is fully staffed, well-resourced, and on the beat. A bad one portends budget trouble and hard choices.

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We simply can’t afford to come up short. There is no cushion in our razor-thin budget—no backup, no alternative sources of revenue to balance our books. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the fierce journalism we do. That’s why we need you to show up for us right now.

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