PODCAST: IN THE DARK: SEASON TWO

PODCAST: IN THE DARK: SEASON TWO

Curtis Flowers has been tried six times for the same crime. For 21 years, Flowers has maintained his innocence. He's won appeal after appeal, but every time, the prosecutor just tries the case again. What does the evidence reveal? And how can the justice system ignore the prosecutor's record and keep Flowers on death row?

MY VERDICT: I loved listening to this podcast but it made me angry. It made me angry because it just didn’t seem fair. This seemed to be your usual case of someone convicted on not enough evidence but it goes much deeper than this. It doesn’t seem like it should be allowed that when someone wins an appeal against their conviction they should have to stay in prison if the DA says he’ll just try again. Why does the DA not face some kind of punishment when he was found to be in the wrong – why do only the defendants suffer? 

This podcast team does some deep, deep investigating. Finding documents long thought lost and collating information on cases going back decades to crate stats that don’t get recorded or checked, but should. 

I would recommend this podcast but prepare to feel dismayed in large doses.

Their website is also very well put together: https://www.apmreports.org/in-the-dark/season-two

And if you haven’t listened to the first season, I would highly recommend that too, it’s not the same story so you don’t need to listen in a particular order. 

FILM 1418: THE ACCUSED

TRIVIA: Upon seeing a pre-screening of the film, Jodie Foster thought her performance as Sarah Tobias was so awful that she immediately began preparing for and taking the GRE's for graduate school. She was prepared to leave her film career behind and focus on academia...until she won the Academy Award for her performance.

Kelly McGillis was offered the role of Sarah Tobias, but having survived a violent sexual assault in 1982 by two men who broke into her apartment, she declined the role and instead fought for the part of Kathryn Murphy.

According Jodie Foster in her interview in Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs and Blockbusters (2006), producer Stanley R. Jaffe felt she was "not sexy enough" for the role and wanted to cast another actress. He felt that 24-year-old Jodie Foster did not have the right talent for the role.

Brad Pitt auditioned for a role.

This is the first film since Two Women (1960) to win the Best Actress Academy Award without being nominated in any other category.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus was considered for the role of Sarah Tobias, but was later discarded because she was "too nice" for the part.

Brian De Palma was originally assigned to direct the movie.

In their separate careers several years after the release of The Accused (1988), both leading ladies, Kelly McGillis and Jodie Foster, publicly and proudly acknowledged their homosexuality. McGillis came out in 2009, and Foster in 2013.