'Conviction' Review: Penetrating Real-Life Drama Exposes Very Real Problem

Sam Rockwell has been hauled back to the cinematic slam, and that’s a good thing. His Green Mile portrayal of Louisiana psycho murderer ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton bouncing around his death row jail cell was a standout performance. Now he shows us another facet in Conviction as Kenneth Waters, a Massachusetts man wrongly convicted of a murder because of police and prosecutorial corruption.

Rockwell’s Conviction performance is enhanced by double Oscar winner Hilary Swank and Oscar-nominee Minnie Driver. Together, they perform like a well-matched troika, the Russian three horse team that pulls sleighs, where the middle horse provides steadiness and stability while the two outer ones gallop with abandon. Driver provides that centeredness with a humorous, smoldering femininity, allowing Rockwell’s and Swank’s characters to respectively express the gut wrenching emotion of a man unjustly convicted and the journey of a sister trying to free him against all odds.

It’s a predicament that many have shared and still do. Evidence fakery and coerced lying under oath by law enforcement officers happens way more often in America’s justice system than most know or would ever believe because too many people think stories like Waters’ are aberrations or exaggerations. In fact, that’s what Hilary Swank thought at first. “There’s a part of you that has to be like, This could never happen. And then you realise that it is happening.”

The particulars of the Conviction story has all of the above abominations and more. It is the stuff of classic fighting-the-system outrage that only gets most people’s blood boiling and talking for a couple of hours after leaving the theater because they don’t think what happened to Rockwell’s character could possibly ever happen to them.

Kenneth Waters was a small town, former juvenile delinquent hell raiser convicted of brutally murdering an Ayer neighbor woman, Katharina Brow, in 1983 because a police officer intimidated people into falsely testifying against him. Waters, who was certainly capable of killing (a bar fight scene where he threatens a man’s life with a broken bottle makes that all too clear), spent 18 years in prison while his sister, Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank), had to earn a high school GED before she could get into college and earn a law degree in order to represent and free her brother.

She finally did so by locating murder weapon blood evidence thought to have been destroyed and then taking it to attorney Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) and his Innocence Project, an organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing. Those DNA tests did not exist at the time of the murder and showed the blood was not Kenneth Waters’.

So he was exonerated and released forthwith, right? Not according to the film, and this is one place where the film story strays from its marquee billing as “The incredible true story of Betty Anne Waters.” That divergence is for the sake of dramatic license says the former district attorney involved: “this is Hollywood. The public should be aware that 20 years of history was collapsed to fit into two hours. This is not a documentary.”

In the script, Margaret Coakley, drags her heels and files unconscionable new CYA charges against Waters which are classics of prosecutorial corruption. “That sequence of time is simply inaccurate and wrong,” says the real Coakley. “Kenny Waters did not sit in jail for months after (the defense team’s) DNA results cleared him. Fact is, he was released from jail in less than two weeks.” Coakley is now the Massachusetts Attorney General. She’s also the Democrat who lost her bid for Teddy Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown because she was too arrogant to campaign for it, according to the Massachusetts media.

Lest I forget, publicity seeking attorney Gloria Allred had a problem with the script as well: “No proper respect or compassion has been shown by Ms. Swank [the executive producer] for the murder victim and her family.” Allred vented at a recent news conference together with Melrose Brow, the daughter of the woman Waters was accused of murdering, who spoke for her siblings: “We are not Hollywood people like you are. We are just children of a murder victim. Nevertheless, we believe that victims matter. My mother was not just a name, and was not and is not a person who should be used as a line in a script or just a way to make a profit for the entertainment industry.”

In response, Conviction’s three producers offered a private family screening: “We have the deepest compassion and sympathy for the family of Katharina Brow. (The screening) will no doubt answer many of their questions surrounding the unthinkable and horrific tragedy that befell their mother.” Opinions about what, if any, obligation the makers of Conviction had to the murdered Brow’s family continue to be expressed. Perhaps the most realistic comes from producer Nathan Folks:

“It is obviously a very sensitive, very painful issue when you’re dealing with such a tragic story, but ‘Conviction’ is about the Waters family, not the Brow family and the filmmakers obviously met with the people they felt necessary for the film. They were not under any legal or moral responsibility to take things further than that.”

Please post your thoughts.

Once free, Waters found that the police officer who had caused his misery could not be criminally prosecuted because the Massachusetts statute of limitations had expired. Kenneth and Betty Anne Waters then spent the next 26 years suing the town of Ayer and its police department for coercing false testimony to convict Kenneth and withholding evidence that could have cleared him. The town and its liability insurer finally agreed to pay 3.4 million dollars last year, but it was too late for Kenneth.

He had been killed in an accident eight years before.

Kenneth Waters’ story is the visible part of a much larger criminal injustice iceberg few dare acknowledge and most news media have no cojones to expose. Rarely do honest law enforcement officials either for reasons ranging from job protection, to pension protection to political and peer pressures to maintain the blue wall of silence. The fact that politicians keep passing increasing numbers of new laws doesn’t help matters. Their sheer accumulation over the years means that I may be unwittingly breaking some law by writing this review and you may be in violation of some statute by reading it.

So as you watch Conviction, please keep in mind that what is happening to the late Kenneth Waters on the screen could happen to any of us, even you.