Forgiven

The original inspiration for the script of FORGIVEN began when writer/director and Northwestern University alumnus, Paul Fitzgerald, began reading about the rash of death row exonerations that took place in the state of Illinois in 2000. Details surrounding the story were featured in the Northwestern alumni magazine long before the story broke as major national news; a group of Northwestern journalism students were the first to bring attention to the crisis. Grave concern that additional innocent persons were potentially going to their death led then Governor George Ryan to issue a blanket commutation of all death sentences to life in prison without parole—simply as a stopgap measure to prevent further injustices and give the state an opportunity to investigate the inadequacies in its judicial system where death penalty cases were concerned. The cases in Illinois triggered a national scrutiny of the death penalty and began a moratorium movement in several states.

“I think the original interest for me was the human angle of wondering who these people were and how they dealt with what had happened to their lives. How do you psychologically survive the kind of injustice these people had been subjected to?” Fitzgerald asks. “Watching the succession of world events soon thereafter, I started to identify emotional parallels in all these people who had been victimized in one way or another, and this incomprehensible groundswell of grief and rage and desire for revenge. As I began researching these cases of exonerated men in more detail, my focus became this particular facet of their ordeal: What is that anger quotient? Is there a desire for revenge? Where and how does that emotion get directed? And ultimately how is this trauma addressed by the system that is responsible for the people’s ordeal in the first place?”