FILMMAKERS

Psychologist, activist and advocate in a wide variety of social justice arenas, actor, director, and playwright. She received the Toronto YWCA Woman of the Year Award and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Institute on Violence, Abuse, and Trauma; from the Association for Women in Psychology; and from the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry; and won a Veterans for Peace Friend of the Veteran Award.   

She is Producer/Writer of award-winning dramatic short, “The Test” and award-winning documentaries “Is Anybody Listening?”, which had screenings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and Parliament Hill in Canada, and “Isaac Pope: The Spirit of an American Century,” which screened at the NAACP’s National Board Meeting, as well as at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Caplan is also a Telly Award-winner for her “Listen to a Veteran!” PSA series and a multi-award-winning playwright, including from Samuel French and Pen + Brush (NYC). She is author of 11 nonfiction books, (three top national awards for nonfiction) and of more than 60 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and dozens of articles in popular publications. Caplan is currently Harvard University Voices of Diversity Project Director and Associate in the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University. She has been Full Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Toronto, Harvard University Lecturer, and Harvard Kennedy School Women and Public Policy Fellow. 

Rock is a Producer, Director, editor and Air Force Veteran. He has more than 27 years producing documentaries, corporate videos, promotional content. Rock is a 

former producer-editor for the American Forces Network (AFN), providing American television and film to the U.S. military in 170 countries. He joined the United States Air Force in 1992 as a Combat Camera Videographer. Throughout his career, Rock has directed and edited documentaries, television programs, award-winning PSAs, and military operations. While at AFN, Rock produced “The Big Deal,” “AFN First Look,” and “AFN On Location,” and interviewed hundreds of celebrities at San Diego Comic- Con and the Academy Awards. Rock also directed and edited two web-series, “Faces of Tourism” and “The O.C. Chef Series” for the Anaheim Orange County Visitors Center Bureau. In 2007, he co-produced and edited a short documentary entitled, “Eden Garden” for a struggling orphanage in Haiti. The short documentary raised over $150,000 in donations for Eden Garden Orphanage. 

His honors include 3 Telly Awards, 2 AVA Digital Awards, 3 LACP Awards, and 3 Videographer Awards for Excellence and Distinction. Recently, Rock’s 3rd film, “Isaac Pope: The Spirit of an American Century,” was given special recognition by the Congressional Black Caucus. 

Joe is a freelance DP based in New York City. He has more than 30 years of experience shooting one-hour and feature- length documentaries, corporate projects, 

reality shows, narrative features – including two for Robert Duvall, and period pieces. In addition to his work with independent producers, Mr. Friedman spent 14 years working with all the major networks, shooting documentaries and in-depth interviews for such shows as “NBC Nightly News,” “Good Morning America,” “The Today Show,” “20/20” and “Dateline.” He won the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award, one of the     

highest accolades in the news business, for one of the many feature stories he
shot for “The Today Show.” He is known
for shooting beautifully lit and framed interviews. In recent years, he shot a series of one-hour documentaries for the award- winning PBS science series, “NOVA.” He also shot “Love Between the Covers,” a feature documentary about the romance novel industry currently available on Netflix and Amazon. 

A two-time Emmy Award winner, Patty composes and writes for film, theatre, 

and television. From “Sesame Street”
to HBO and PBS documentary films, 

from independent features to plays and musicals, Stotter is all about the right voice at the right time. 

Her awards include two Emmy Awards and five nominations, as well as these: American Cine Eagle Award, Apple Award, Shining Service World Award, and Silver Star Award from the Volunteers of America. She has also co-conceived and co-produced the film, “SERVICE: When Women Come Marching Home” and created numerous theatre project

Don Rebic (Music Director/Pianist) has been a composer, musical director and pianist for more than thirty-five years. He began his career as the Musical Director for the 1977 Broadway 

production of “Jesus Christ Superstar”
and went on to conduct the National Companies of “Dancin’,” “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and was the Associate Conductor for the North American tour of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” starring Chita Rivera. He has served as musical director and accompanist for Karen Akers, Mary Cleere Haran, Peggy Lee, Leslie Uggams, Barbara Cook, Maureen McGovern, Tovah Feldshuh, Victoria Clark, Christine Andreas, Morgana King and many others. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Backstage Bistro Award for outstanding Musical Direction. As a composer, Don has written music for an Off Off Broadway show, an original song for the movie “Night Catches Us” starring Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington as well as a Christmas song that was performed by Michael Feinstein. He was the Artistic Director of Singers Forum, New York’s premier vocal academy for 8 years until 2013, and has served on the Board 

of Governors for the New York Television Academy. 

American lawyer, social justice activist, founder/executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a clinical professor at New York University School of Law.     

Stevenson challenged bias against the poor and people from racialized groups in the criminal justice system, especially children. He has helped achieve United States Supreme Court decisions that prohibit sentencing children under 18 to death or to life imprisonment without parole. 

He initiated both the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honors the more than 4,000 African American victims of lynching, and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which shows the connection between lynchings and the high rate of executions and incarceration of people of color in the United States. He is also the author of the New York Times Bestseller Just Mercy. The book was adapted as a film with the same name, starring Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson, released December 2019. 

Sister Helen Prejean heads Ministry Against the Death Penalty and is the nun who wrote the book Dead Man Walking, which was based on her spiritual advising of prisoners on Death Row and was made into a feature film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. Her two subsequent books, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions and River of Fire, depict her passionate, tireless activism against the death penalty. 

Best known for his role as Captain B.J. Hunnicutt on the television series “M*A*S*H” (1975– 83), Farrell is also
an activist and public speaker for various political causes. Farrell was a 

producer of “Patch Adams” starring Robin Williams, and he starred in the television series “Providence.” Farrell has also appeared in “Desperate Housewives,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Supernatural,” and FX’s anthology series “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace.” Most recently, Farrell has appeared in “NCIS,” playing the role of Judge Miles Deakin. 

Farrell has graciously agreed to do the voice over for our film. 

Justice John Paul Stevens served as
an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court and, as part of his increasing opposition to the death penalty, wrote the majority decision in the 2002 Atkins v. Virginia case ruling that it is unconstitutional to execute people with what was then called “mental retardation,” now called “Intellectual Disabilities.” In that decision, Justice Stevens named the Jerome Bowden case, which is featured in “Execution by the Numbers,” 

as having been a major factor impelling
19 states to outlaw executions of people with those intellectual limitations, and that pattern helped move the SCOTUS majority to rule in Atkins that such executions constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” 

Mildred Hill is an expert in special education and parent of a daughter with Intellectual Disabilities. While Executive Director of ARC of Georgia, she evaluated Jerome Bowden on Death Row and helped plead his case for clemency before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, leading to a temporary stay of his execution. She also helped impel the Georgia State Legislature to pass a law in 1988 making Georgia the first state to prohibit the execution of people with “mental retardation.” That law was inspired by outcry over Jerome’s execution. She cannily urged anti-death-penalty activists in the state to keep silent while the proposed law was being considered, because she recognized that -- Georgia politics being what they were -- the law wouldn’t have a prayer of passing if it were seen as part of opposition to the death penalty rather than consideration of people with low IQs. 

Michael Perlin is a Professor Emeritus
at New York Law School and prolific writer about reasons that people with Intellectual Disabilities have continued to be executed even since the Atkins decision, as well as what reforms are needed to ensure that these executions end. He is internationally recognized as an expert about mental disability law and has written 23 books and nearly 300 scholarly articles about the subject. 

Samuel Oates, Jr., was barely out of law school and had almost no criminal experience in 1976 when the court in Columbus, GA, appointed him to represent Jerome Bowden. Given almost no time and no resources to prepare the case, as well as a defendant whose intellectual limitations made it impossible for him to assist Oates in his defense or even to understand court procedures, Oates tried heroically to save Jerome’s life but failed to do so. After Jerome was sentenced to death, Oates decided not to practice criminal law, and to this day, he says he thinks about Jerome every day, because more time, resources, and experience would have made all the difference, and Jerome would be alive today. Oates has been a plaintiff’s attorney in personal injury cases and was elected to Super Lawyers 2009-2013. 

Douglas C. Pullen was Prosecutor in
the Jerome Bowden case, also prosecuting the person who committed the crime for which Jerome was executed. He succeeded in having Blacks excluded from the jury that heard Jerome’s case, and the skill with which Pullen presented the case and delivered his closing argument led the jurors to fail to notice that not a shred of the material evidence was ever linked to Jerome. He may have been involved in the focus in the trial being on what was called Jerome’s “confession,” when in fact Jerome had signed three confessions on successive days, the contents of those documents contradicting each other. Pullen later became a senior judge of the Chattahochee Circuit in Georgia and received an honorary degree from Mercer University. He retired from the bench in 2011 after a meeting with the Director of the Judicial Qualifications Commission. Media coverage described him as “embattled” and at the center of a protracted judicial misconduct probe. 

Professor James W. Ellis is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New Mexico Law School and an advocate
for people with Intellectual Disabilities in the civil and criminal justice systems. He has filed briefs in 18 cases in the United States Supreme Court, and in 2002 he argued Atkins v. Virginia, in which execution of individuals with what was then called “mental retardation” was ruled as violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. His argument in the Atkins case marked the first time he had presented an argument in any court. He has served as President of the American Association on Mental Retardation (now called the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities), was recognized by the National Historic Trust on Mental Retardation as one of 36 significant individuals in the field of mental retardation in the 20th century, was named the National Law Journal’s Lawyer of the Year in 2002, and won the Paul Hearne Award for Disability Advocacy from the American Bar Association and Champion of Justice Award by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. 

Millard Farmer, Jr., grew up in a wealthy, white family in Newnan, Georgia, driven to the whites- only public school in a limousine, grew up to become a lawyer, and, against enormous opposition, became 

the first major, fearless opponent of the death penalty in the state. He has worked unceasingly to defend the most oppressed when they have been accused of crimes. He has served time in jail for contempt of court for speaking out about injustice and corruption in cases in which racism and poverty have impeded the workings of the justice system. He was the first attorney to teach and support Sister Helen Prejean in her work against capital punishment, and she names him as the hero lawyer of her book, Dead Man Walking. 

Brian Kammer is the Director of
Mercer University Law School’s Habeas Project, having served for ten years as Executive Director of the Georgia Resource Center, which provides representation to death-sentenced prisoners in Georgia and federal habeas corpus proceedings. He is known for his “passion for justice,” advocating especially for people from racialized groups and the indigent, which has led, among other things, to his decades-long handling of the appeals for Warren Hill, an African American man with Intellectual Disabilities who was ultimately executed in Georgia in 2015. Kammer said that when Hill, who was slightly older than he, was executed, he felt like he had lost his older brother. His reports of his recent experiences with the arbitrary and irresponsible workings of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles are strikingly similar to those with the Board in Jerome Bowden’s case decades earlier. 

Patricia Fain, as an expert on “mental retardation” and an attorney, was ideally qualified to work on Jerome Bowden’s final appeal for clemency, which went to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. 

Working with Mildred Hill, the Executive Director of ARC of Georgia, she persuaded the Board to issue a stay of execution. She was stunned when the Board Chair soon phoned to say they had lifted the stay 

and were planning to execute Jerome the next morning and invited her to attend his execution. In “Execution by the Numbers,” she describes the arbitrary and irresponsible ways she saw the Board conduct the meeting she attended.