ONE LAST SHOT

by Lisa R. Cohen

So here’s the new project I’m immersing myself in – a different side of Crime, Ink. But first, some history.

In 1996 I was producing for ABC News PrimeTime Live. I traveled to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, site of the film Dead Man Walking and one of the most notoriously brutal prisons in American history.

Correspondent Cynthia McFadden and I were profiling Susan Sarandon, the actress who played Sister Helen Prejean in the movie, but the piece had spun away from us and we found ourselves in the death chamber at Angola, interviewing Sister Helen herself. She understood the value of a good visual.

From there, it was just a short hop – ok, a very long one - to a one-hour PrimeTime Live special on the death penalty called “Judgment at Midnight.” Cynthia and I and a very talented production team installed cameras on Death Row, including two fixed cameras clamped to a condemned man’s cell bars round the clock.

We followed him for days, finally to the door of the death chamber, where we watched him walk in. Along the way, we also interviewed his family, the family of his victims, the lawyers for both sides, the guards, and his fellow death row inmates. And we spent a lot of time with Warden Burl Cain, who gave the orders for his death, a very media savvy man who told us, “If you’re going to be for the death penalty, you ought to see the way it all happens… see it from my shoes.”

It was a profound and humbling experience. Now, thirteen years later, I’m back at Angola for a look at another kind of death penalty. This time our story takes place inside the infirmary, following the lives – and deaths – of hospice patients who’ve been given months to live because of diseases like liver failure, cancer, or heart disease. Old men’s diseases inside walls where 9 out of every ten inmates is serving life, until they die, inside these walls.

But the story is less about the terminal patients than it is about the hospice staff, the men who care for the patients until they die, then care for their successors until they die, and on and on. The staff is made up of fellow inmates, also serving life sentences. Most are killers who will now see death in a different way, up close, lingering, with plenty of time to know and develop ties to the dying. For many it is the first time they’re developing these kinds of ties to anyone, as they help feed, bathe, carry or wheel their patients around. As the end approaches, they’ll change their patients’ diapers, sit with them round the clock in a vigil, pray with them, and finally, help to bury them.

In our proposed documentary, we’ll ask questions about what that work does to someone who cared so little about life before this. We’ll ponder redemption. I’d like to think I’m going into this with an open mind. But I wonder what the preconceptions of my readers here are.

Here is the link to the five-minutes-and-change trailer that came of our trip there last month. We’ll use it to raise funds and interest, to get our project made. The documentary is tentatively titled ONE LAST SHOT. Your comments are welcome. And if anyone has a better title to suggest, we're open to ideas.

Watch here:

Or go to:
http://www.lisarcohen.com/OneLastShotFinalWeb.mov

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Introducing New Woman In Crime Ink - Lisa R. Cohen

by Lisa R. Cohen

The Etan Patz case is one of the best examples I have ever seen of “Justice Interrupted,” the name used by some of the women on this blog to describe their cause, of going after the toughest abuses against the most vulnerable of victims.

Etan was six ½ in 1979 when he disappeared off the streets of Manhattan sometime between 8:00 and 8:30 on a misty morning, somewhere between his home and the school bus stop two short blocks away. He had finally convinced his mother Julie to let him make the short trip alone. She walked him down the stairs, unlocked the door – he was too short to reach the lock himself – and kissed him goodbye on the street before watching him head off.

He never came home. He was missing more than 8 hours by the time Julie realized that he hadn’t ever made it to school that day. She immediately called her husband, then the police, and by nightfall some 300 NYPD were combing the streets.

Etan’s father Stan is a professional photographer. He took hundreds of lovingly shot photos of his son, and Etan’s beautiful face smiled down from missing posters around New York City, and then throughout the country. They were translated into several languages and ultimately sent around the world. Etan became, quite literally, the poster child for missing children. The day he disappeared is now marked every May 25th as National Missing Children’s Day.

Thirty years ago, missing children certainly weren’t unheard of, but Etan Patz was the one case that triggered a sea change. Thirty years ago, children walked to school by themselves (I know I did, in kindergarten). They played outside until it was time to come home for dinner. And when a child went missing, there was no centralized place to cry out for help, no national data banks, no National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Everything changed, after Etan.

Today, the man responsible for Etan's death has never been charged, but he sits in jail after one determined prosecutor got him convicted for something else, in Etan's name. How that happened, and how the prosecutor traveled the world to build his case, is detailed for the first time in AFTER ETAN: The Missing Child Case That Held America Captive (Grand Central Publishing, May 09).

After twenty five years, the serial pedophile, Jose Antonio Ramos, will walk free in 2012, unless he can be stopped. But there's new movement to do that, spearheaded by that same (former) prosecutor and Etan's father Stan Patz.

I’ve reported on this story for almost twenty years, as a producer at the network news magazines “PrimeTime Live” and “60 Minutes.” Then I spent five years writing AFTER ETAN, the first book ever on this case in all those thirty years.

It’s the story I could never walk away from, and its twists and turns both confounded and astonished me. Recently, “20/20” spent a full hour reprising some of the reporting from my first piece in 1990, and adding several other significant developments recounted in the book. It’s a tough story, but it’s also filled with real life heroes who faced incredible odds with courage and dedication.

Etan’s legacy can’t make up for the tragedy he and his family have suffered, but it’s an impressive one. Through my book, my ongoing writings here and elsewhere, I want to paint the picture of the before and after, tell some of the incredible tale that spans thirty years of this case, and track both the case and the issue of missing and exploited children onward into the future. In doing so, I hope I’ll be able to pass on some of the valuable lessons I myself have learned.

Thanks for this opportunity.

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