(2010) After her brother's murder conviction, following her own conviction of his innocence, Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) spends the next 18 years of her life fighting for his exoneration. "We'll get you out, Kenny!" Kudos to the makeup crew for realistically aging the characters.

Based on a true story, Pamela Gray's screenplay as directed by Tony Goldwyn takes us on a long excursion of rough injustice (lies and more damned lies) before final vindication. In 1980 in Ayer, Mass., Mrs Katharina Brow was brutally murdered in her trailer home - stabbed 30 times and her head bashed in with a toaster. Initially picked up on suspicion by the only female officer on the force, Nancy Taylor (Melissa Leo), Kenny "Muddy" Waters (Sam Rockwell) was released only to be arrested two years later during the funeral service for his grandfather. "Once I get my lead," Officer Taylor reportedly said, "I never let go."

A mother with two children, Ben and Richard, Betty Anne, employed as a waitress at a pub, decides to get her GED and go to college. Her husband, Rick Miller (Loren Dean), adamantly opposes her: "You gotta make peace with this … accept it." Following Kenny's attempt at suicide, Betty Anne reveals her plan to get a law degree to get him out of prison - "You're innocent" - if he'll promise not to give up: "Are you sure about that?"

He'd been found guilty of extreme atrocity and armed robbery following a blood-type match at the scene of the crime (60% of the human population has O-type blood) and testimony from two former girlfriends (definitely guilty of poor taste in women) - Brenda Marsh (Clea DuVall), the mother of his baby daughter Mandy, and Roseanna Perry (Juliette Lewis) - both saying he'd boasted of the killing to them but that they'd waited so long to come forward out of fear of being his next victims. His alibi of being a cook at the diner at the time lacked corroboration.

Another person seated in the witness chair in the courtroom was Elizabeth Waters (Karen Young), who in addition to being Kenny and Betty Anne's biological mother had given birth to seven other children by seven different men; as kids the brother and sister had trespassed into Mrs Brow's abode, resulting in their being separated and sent to grow up in several foster homes.

While attending Roger Williams School of Law and working, trying to raise her two teenage boys on her own (determined to be a better parent than her mother), she finally lets them go stay with their father, at their request, which, feeling a failure as a mother, nearly causes her to give up. Encouragement from her friend and fellow law student Abra Rice (Minnie Driver) keeps her on track, leading to a fortuitous discovery in a case assigned for class, Sewell v. State, 1992, of DNA evidence used to clear a man, who'd spent ten years in jail, wrongly convicted of rape.

Next Betty Anne contacts Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) with the Innocence Project, but the organization dedicated to exonerating with DNA evidence people wrongfully incarcerated has a backlog of cases (an anticipated 18-month wait to evaluate her brother's case), plus she must obtain blood samples from evidence collected at the crime scene. Knowing it's Kenny's only remaining chance of getting out of prison, even after being told that police records indicate that the evidence was destroyed ten years after the trial (allowed under state law), Betty Anne refuses to concede: "That evidence exists somewhere, and I'm going to find it."

Cynical about the system that put him away, Kenny says to his sister: "It's gonna test positive." During a confrontation with Nancy Taylor about her having allegedly been involved in framing another cop, the ex-patrolwoman disdainfully says to Betty Anne: "I am sorry you have wasted your time on this." Even after Betty Anne passes the bar exam and obtains the results needed to vacate the verdict, complications forcing one detour and disappointment after another because authorities aren't willing to admit mistakes.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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