After all, if the criminal justice system is good enough to convict people for capital offenses and send them to the chair, and no innocent people are executed, then this exhibit is a bunch of bunk.
For the rest, this sounds like a worthwhile exhibition to attend.
=====From Yahoo News=========
'The Innocents' exonerated by photography that once betrayed them
By Emanuella Grinberg, Court TV
NEW YORK — William Gregory can't help gushing over the photo of him hanging at the P.S. 1 art gallery in Queens, in spite of what it signifies.
"It exudes so much," he says, describing the sullen portrait of him sitting on the edge of a pool table in a dark bar, wrapped in his fiance's embrace. "I can see the pain and anguish in my face, the intenseness of what they did to this individual."
"They" — the criminal justice system — arrested Gregory, charged him with rape, attempted rape and two counts of burglary and convicted him, despite the alibi testimony of the woman who holds him in his portrait. He then spent seven years in the Northpoint Training Center in Fayette County, Kentucky until 2000, when he become the state's first inmate to be exonerated through DNA evidence. His release was won through the help of defense lawyer Barry Scheck of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law's Innocence Project.
The photo is one of 45 portraits photographer Taryn Simon took for the book, "The Innocents", of wrongfully-convicted men (and one woman) exonerated through DNA evidence. A selection of the portraits will travel across the country to different galleries, a composite image of the realities faced by the men and women who have been exonerated through the Innocence Project's work over the past decade.
The book and the exhibition mark the tenth anniversary of the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal aid clinic that has applied DNA evidence to help exonerate 132 men and women across the United States. It also kicks off the Innocence Project's newest initiative, the Life After Exoneration Project, a program that will help make the transition from prison to life on the outside smoother for exonerees. "The story of their lives since they've been released is another part of the story," says Aliza Kaplan, deputy director and one of the staff attorneys for the Innocence Project. "By reaching out through art, we're telling those stories to an audience that might not necessarily read them in the newspapers."
Gregory's picture hangs with 14 other life-sized blow-ups capturing the subjects in various settings relevant to their convictions. Some stand at the scenes of their alleged crimes or failed alibi locations. The pool table Gregory sits on speaks to the pool champion he became while in prison for seven years. Ron Williamson, who was drafted by the Oakland A's before serving 11 years on death row for first-degree murder, poses on a baseball field.
For each of these men, freedom is bittersweet as they struggle to find their place back in society. Since his release, Gregory has set his sights on creating the William T. Gregory Foundation to help others adjust to being exonerated, but such plans have been stalled as he struggles to make his way back up a ladder he fell off almost 10 years ago. He won't discuss the details of his lawsuit seeking damages, "for what they done to me," except to say that if it is successful, those earnings could help him get started.
"I was doing well for myself, I had awards, I was meeting my goals — I know because I'd write 'em down — I was a high achiever," he says, on the phone from rural Kentucky, near the Ford plant outside of Louisville. "You'd think it would be easy to get that back, but it's not."
In prison, the mortal fear he developed has made Gregory a creature of habit, so much so that he locks doors behind him whenever he leaves or enters a room, and always checks the backseat when getting into his car. "When you go in on a sexual charge, you gotta be watching your back. The guys in there say, 'that coulda been my wife, or my daughter.' They respect murderers and thieves, but they can't respect baby-rapists or tree jumpers. After watching your back for eight years, you get a lot of baggage, and I got it."
He compares his situation to that of a solider returning from combat. Except, he says, "at least the government has a deprogramming situation for them, 30 days or something before they put you back into society, but we don't have no deprogramming situations because this is brand-spanking new. There's only 130 of us, but there should be thousands more."
A New York Times freelance photographer, 28-year-old Taryn Simon first met Gregory in the summer of 2000 while on a similar shoot for the Times Magazine about men exonerated through DNA evidence. Awed by their stories, particularly the misconceptions the public tended to hold of what life is like for wrongfully-convicted persons once they are freed, Simon applied for a John Guggenheim grant to photograph more of them and received it.
She then approached The Innocence Project's founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld with her idea. A friend of Scheck's, Nan Gregory of Umbrage Books, convinced the two to support the idea of a photo journal and traveling exhibit to publicize their efforts to free innocent men and expose the criminal justice system, warts and all — using the men's own words and images.
"This isn't just a publishing campaign, it's more like an outreach program," says Gregory. "There's no turning away from the real-life story of someone who's been there and proved to not have done it and spent 15 to 20 years of his life in jail for it; it's a powerful indictment of what we're not doing right."
The foreword in The Innocents, as well as the curatorial note introducing the gallery exhibit, describes the photographic mission. "In the cases presented, photography offered the justice system a tool that assisted officers in obtaining erroneous eyewitness identifications, aided prosecutors in securing convictions and transformed innocent citizens into criminals." Most wrongful convictions, it says, stem from mistaken eyewitness identifications: "through exposure to composite sketches, mug shots, polaroids and lineups, eyewitness memory can change."
And so, the images in both the exhibit and the book are accompanied by either a caption or a page of text from Simon's interviews with each subject. "I tried to load the photo with as much history and context as possible to confront the viewer with the accusation that was placed upon the people," she says. "It was important to me, because photography had been used in a negligent way to secure their convictions, to be very careful about context in this go-around using photography."
Simon traveled across the United States for six months shooting her subjects, often facing their reticence to return to the sites of the crimes they were accused and convicted of, or the location of the alibis juries didn't believe. One man told her he didn't want to fail a polygraph test if ever asked if he was familiar with the crime scene. But in each circumstance, she says, "I took them back to those sites to present this bizarre relationship between truth and fiction, which demonstrated (that while) the public wants to think this is the sort of thing they can get beyond once they're exonerated and freed from all these associations, it's not. They have to deal with a skeptical public; these accusations will be with them forever."
And if the photos make the viewer uneasy, all the better, she says. "I kept a distance to create a degree of discomfort, which is that you and I can try and empathize, but we will never understand what it's like to go through something like that. I didn't want to embrace the emotional side because it's something neither I nor a photo can access."
As for Mr. Gregory, he came out of jail with a goal — to help aid future exonerees in their transition. With the release of this book and the exhibit opening, he is hopeful that may finally happen. "To see my photo and learn about what happened to me helps a lot of other people in prison," he says.
"I don't want to be remembered, I just want to help. I want to encourage people not to give up. I almost did, about five or six times."
