a_baron

This is a fairly run-of-the-mill documentary. A film crew visits death row in Texas where they speak to convicted murderers, prison staff, the families of victims, campaigners against the death penalty and for it.

Anti-death penalty campaigners make a lot of noise, but in 1996, the population of Texas was a shade over 19 million. In 1996, the State executed three men; in 1997, it executed 37 men including triple killer David Spence who appears in this documentary. In 1998, it executed 19 men and 1 woman. This isn't a large number; the real scandal is that they all linger on death row for years. Richard Brimage, the first execution of 1997, was convicted of murder in February 1988. There is absolutely no need for a convicted murderer duly sentenced to death to be kept alive more than a year, two at most, allowing for (mostly frivolous) appeals and due process.

Ordinarily, I would give a documentary like this 10 points out of 10, but I will resist giving it any grade because frankly it should never have been made. The time for a documentary of this nature to be broadcast is after the trial although it would of course be assembled well before its conclusion.

The Idaho Student Murders were committed in the small hours of November 13, 2022, and this three quarter of an hour Court TV offering was released a year to the day after. In the UK, there would have been hardly any coverage at all, certainly no prosecutor would have spoken, while comments by police officers would have been strictly limited to appeals for information and an announcement that a man had been arrested. His name and other basics would have been released at some point, but apart from that, there would have been no details whatsoever.

The reasons for this are not difficult to seek; run the names Colin Stagg and Christopher Jefferies through your search engine if you are in any doubt. Jefferies was the landlord of murder victim Joanna Yeates and the first person to be arrested on suspicion. He was cleared fairly quickly when the real killer was arrested, but poor Colin Stagg had to wait over a decade before being cleared of the murder of Rachel Nickell during which time he went through Hell including spending over a year on remand, and even today, more than a decade and a half after the conviction of the real killer, there are almost certainly people out there who believe Stagg got away with murder.

Thankfully, the evidence against Bryan Kohberger appears now to be orders of magnitude stronger than that against Jefferies and Stagg, but the correct place to try a shoplifting case much less a quadruple murder is in a court of law, not the court of public opinion.

This is a straightforward documentary about two odious individuals from Down Under: killer couple David and Catherine Birnie. In spite of their shared surname, they were not married, at least not to each other. Indeed, although they were childhood sweethearts, the way they came together to violate and murder young women is extraodinary. Because the material within is not ancient, the documentary makers have found a number of people who knew them to share their memories, and horrible stuff it is too. There is also archive footage of them; David Birnie committed suicide in prison on October 7, 2004. At the time of writing, Catherine is still behind bars and will hopefully remain so until she dies too.

We could have done with less of psychobabbler Leah Giarratano; evil doesn't need explaining, only documenting, and preventing whenever we can.