Justice, Journalism and A Murder in the Park
Written by Maggie Glass
A young black man, Anthony Porter, is arrested for a double murder and put on death row. A passionate journalism professor and his students investigate the crime, find an alternate suspect, and successfully petition for Porter’s release just days before his scheduled execution. An ostensible triumph for justice — and yet, as Christopher Rech’s and Brandon Kimber’s film A Murder in the Park reveals, the motivations of those involved were highly questionable, the truth was stretched beyond all reason, and an innocent man, Alstory Simon, was himself wrongfully imprisoned as a result.
A Murder in the Park takes a detailed look at a complex case, focusing on a double homicide in a Chicago park in 1982, the geography of the crime scene, the testimonials of eyewitnesses, and the grand jury statements made by the journalism students who argued for Anthony Porter’s innocence. The case for Porter’s freedom took a particularly dark turn when Northwestern University professor David Protess hired a private investigator, Paul Ciolino, to pursue another suspect: Milwaukee resident Alstory Simon. Ciolino arrived at Simon’s house in the early hours of the morning, showed him a videotape of a man (later revealed to be an actor) accusing Simon of the murder, and told him his best option was to confess. Simon, tired and confused and coming off drugs, obeyed. “We just bull-rushed him,” Ciolino said in a later interview. “Mentally, he couldn’t recover.” The video was featured on a news broadcast and Porter was almost immediately released — despite the fact that the video’s legitimacy was never verified. It was 1999 and Porter was a free man with Simon serving in his place.
In the years that followed, eyewitnesses recanted their stories, Simon maintained his innocence, and rumors spread that David Protess had promised money from book and movie deals to key witnesses. “Dr. Protess probably did some really good work at some point,” said Rech in the post-film discussion, “but this is a case of just completely cutting corners and farming out the investigation to a private eye. Paul Ciolino did his job. But in doing his job, he railroaded a guy.”
For filmmakers already documenting a story of twists and turns, the most remarkable development was the rush to change their movie’s ending less than three weeks before the DOC NYC festival. The new scenes had to reflect the events of October 30th, 2014: the day Alstory Simon was finally released from prison. In the post-screening discussion, the filmmakers still seemed to be reeling from their documentary’s impact. “We do Crime Stoppers television – we put people away,” said Rech. “It’s the first time we ever attempted to get someone out. We didn’t think it was possible.” The filmmakers were joined by Alstory Simon himself – a free man for the first time in fifteen years and eight months. An audience member asked how he could remain so positive and forgiving after experiencing so much injustice.
“At first, I was very bitter,” he said. “The first five or seven years I was very angry. I had so much anger and hate inside of me for what these people had done to me. But then I learned that you can’t walk around with hate built up inside you. You’ve got to let that go. Otherwise it will lead to your own self-destruction.”
For more about A Murder in the Park, visit the film page on the DOC NYC website.
