Search Results for "capital punishment"

A man takes over a TV station and holds a number of hostages as a political platform to awaken humanity, instead of money.

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This is not a Clara Bow vehicle, and yet it is clearly the aspect/asset of Clara Bow which elevates a fairly serious melodrama to a timeless and profound social statement. Opening the film on death row where the handsome youth awaits the chair, a stirring test of the legal system evolves after two elite types conspire to expose its inadequacies. Elite, jaded society lawyer Gordon Harrington fabricates a murder, implicating an entirely "hired" fall-guy, one Dan O'Connor, while the bored playboy-type hides away on a yacht until the points are proven and the legal system has been disgraced. Naturally, something goes wrong, the playboy really turns up murdered, and O'Connor is now the accused, imprisoned murderer scheduled to be hanged.

Underground fighter James Thayer's loyalties are tested when he is recruited by a secretive agency to take down a drug trafficking ring operated by the man who trained him.

A young black woman finds herself in an ambiguous time of familiarity as she attempts to navigate through the current turbulences of her day. Within 24 hours, her life descends into a quiet panic as she loses foothold on her reality. She must act in order to make the changes necessary for her well-being, in a fantastical effort to overthrow those who oppress her.

Pink film from Toei.

From ancient practices such as death by a thousand cuts and hanging, drawing and quartering to the modern scientific era of lethal injection, we ask the question: do the most horrific crimes deserve the most horrific of punishments?

This is the 19th installment in the "Psychic vs. Human" Series.

A supernatural tale set on death row in a Southern prison, where gentle giant John Coffey possesses the mysterious power to heal people's ailments. When the cell block's head guard, Paul Edgecomb, recognizes Coffey's miraculous gift, he tries desperately to help stave off the condemned man's execution.

The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors' prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other.

Defense attorney Martin Vail takes on jobs for money and prestige rather than any sense of the greater good. His latest case involves an altar boy, accused of brutally murdering the archbishop of Chicago. Vail finds himself up against his ex-pupil and ex-lover, but as the case progresses and the Church's dark secrets are revealed, Vail finds that what appeared a simple case takes on a darker, more dangerous aspect.

A young lawyer defends a black man accused of murdering two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter, sparking a rebirth of the KKK.

About to be electrocuted for a catalog of heinous crimes, the unrepentant Horace Pinker transforms into a terrifying energy source. Only young athlete Jonathan Parker, with an uncanny connection to him through bizarre dreams, can fight the powerful demon.

Disgusted with the policies of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell plans to take his family to the New World. But on the eve of their departure, Cromwell is drawn into the tangled web of religion and politics that will result in the English Civil War.

An LA police officer is murdered in the onion fields outside of Bakersfield. However, legal loopholes could keep his kidnappers from receiving justice, and his partner is haunted by overwhelming survivor's guilt.

An attorney defends a hoodlum of murder, using the oppressiveness of the slums to appeal to the court.

Ruth Ellis lives with her ten-year old son Andy next to a night club. One night she meets David Blakely, and they start a love affair. However, for David with his upper-class background, it is impossible to uphold the relationship. He breaks up with her, something which makes Ellis, obsessed by him, very upset.

Originally titled Nous Sommes Tout des Assassins, We Are All Murderers was directed by Andre Cayette, a former lawyer who detested France's execution system. Charles Spaak's screenplay makes no attempt to launder the four principal characters (Marcel Mouloudji, Raymond Pellegrin, Antoinine Balpetre, Julien Verdeir): never mind the motivations, these are all hardened murderers. Still, the film condemns the sadistic ritual through which these four men are brought to the guillotine. In France, the policy is to never tell the condemned man when the execution will occur--and then to show up without warning and drag the victim kicking and screaming to his doom, without any opportunity to make peace with himself or his Maker. By the end of this harrowing film, the audience feels as dehumanized as the four "protagonists." We Are All Murderers was roundly roasted by the French law enforcement establishment, but it won a special jury prize at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.

A documentary film about Martta Koskinen, the last executed woman in Finland during the war in 1943. Martta was a Seamstress who lived in Helsinki during the Second World War. She was one of the post-civil war (in 1918) generation for whom the war had meant a disappointment in the system and failure in unity of the Finnish nation. The legacy of the civil war had left systems of persecution in place for those with socialist ideals. Martta and her fellow revolutionaries were determined to continue the resistance movement although they knew that at worst it could cost their lives. Martta was imprisoned twice before she was shot. She was an idealist, whose seemingly harmless, naive beliefs in peace and justice were the most dangerous traits a person could have at the time.

A newspaper publisher, wanting to prove a point about the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence, talks his possible son-in-law Tom into a hoax in an attempt to expose ineptitude of the city's hard-line district attorney. The plan is to have Tom plant clues leading to his arrest for killing a female nightclub dancer. Once Tom is found guilty, he is to reveal the setup and humiliate the DA.

Following in his father's footsteps, Albert Pierrepoint becomes one of Britain's most prolific executioners, hiding his identity as a grocery deliveryman. But when his ambition to be the best inadvertently exposes his gruesome secret, he becomes a minor celebrity & faces a public outcry against the practice of hanging. Based on true events.

In 1950s England, slow-witted Derek Bentley falls in with a group of petty criminals led by Chris Craig, a teenager with a fondness for American gangster films. Chris and Derek's friendship leads to their involvement in the true case which would forever shake England's belief in capital punishment.

In 1747, a handsome but rebellious Scotsman named Richard Abdee is auctioned off as a slave on a Caribbean island controlled by French and British sugar-planters. When caught having sex with his owner's wife, Abdee is given 100 lashes with the dreaded "dragonard" whip. This sentence is meant to be fatal but Abdee survives and later joins in a slave revolt which puts an end to the island's era of savage whippings.

In this fact-based made-for TV film, Gary Gilmore, an Indiana man who just finished serving a lengthy stay in prison, tries to start anew by moving to Utah. Before long, Gary begins an ill-advised romance with the troubled Nicole Baker, a teenage single mother. As their relationship quickly deteriorates, Gary goes on a murderous rampage, leaving two dead. During his trial, he demands capital punishment; a media circus ensues and outsiders look to profit from his story.

A cheating husband is charged in the poisoning death of his invalid wife, in spite of other women and suicide also being suspected.

Liberal district attorney decides to seek the death penalty for a man who slaughtered a family at Christmastime, then drank their blood. He escapes, though, and starts killing again.

A young criminal defense attorney struggles with a homicide case that is not as cut and dry as it appears while battling a drinking habit. The story goes beyond the lives of those directly related to the case and shines a much needed spotlight on the horrific world of human trafficking in the United States.

A condemned murderer, in the process of being executed, relives the events that led to his being sentenced to die in the electric chair. Told in flashback, we witness a sleazy dancehall girl dupe a high rise riveter into marriage so she can live off of him. But when he loses his job and his marbles, she ends up supporting him with money from her side man--and misses no opportunity to rub it in his face that she's now supporting him in his emasculated state. As the animosity grows and things get more and more unbearable, he is eventually driven to desperate measures.