ABC film argues for fresh look at death-row cases

For four seasons, Viola Davis has starred in the ABC series “How To Get Away With Murder.”

Her new series for the network, “The Last Defense,” might well be called “How To Get Convicted of Murder.”

The seven-part documentary, which started Tuesday, re-argues cases of two prisoners awaiting execution. It begins with Davis (one of several executive producers) saying in a voice-over that every year, an average of five prisoners on death row are exonerated.

“The Last Defense” offers a powerful argument that people can be convicted as much by emotion and prejudice as by evidence.

The first four episodes re-examine the 1997 murder conviction of Darlie Routier, a Texas woman whose two young sons were stabbed to death.

Routier called in the killing to 911, saying that an intruder had attacked her and the boys while they slept. Although Routier was herself wounded badly, including a life-threatening slash to the throat, prosecutors soon charged her. Experts for the prosecution argued that Routier’s knife wounds were self-inflicted and that blood spatter and broken glass found at the crime scene were inconsistent with her account.

The documentary notes a significant exculpatory piece of evidence — a sock, stained with both boys’ blood, found down an alley from the house. “The Last Defense” suggests that investigators minimized it because they were already invested in Routier as a suspect.

But the most powerful part of the case against Routier — and the most disturbing, • "The Last Defense" airs at 10 p.m. Tuesdays on ABC, including WSYX-TV (Channel 6).

in the retelling — was an all-out character attack. Prosecutors painted her as a materialistic, “selfcentered” woman for whom children were “an impediment to the good life.” The strategy worked. “The Last Defense” is plainly a work of advocacy, but it’s sensitive to the drive for justice. It’s hard not to see the home-video footage of Routier’s sons, the blood stains on the Power Rangers bedsheets, and not want someone to be punished. The show questions whether that desire can overwhelm the evidence.

The last three episodes cover the case of Julius Jones, an Oklahoma college student sentenced to death at 21 in a 1999 carjacking murder. The series suggests a theory that Jones might have been set up by an acquaintance and examines the potential role of racism in his trial: an AfricanAmerican man accused of killing a white man in the suburbs.

The episodes also tell a depressingly familiar story: that Jones didn’t receive anywhere near the best possible defense from the public defenders who represented him and that the system rigidly resists admitting mistakes.

“The Last Defense” comes amid a recent boom in true crime, including Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” and its expansion of the 2004 documentary “The Staircase.”

Whether or not viewers find its arguments in these two cases exonerating, the series makes a disturbing argument about the potential for error in capital cases.