In May 1961 a small civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), organized a sort of rolling protest against the segregation laws in the Deep South of the United States.

Two groups of Freedom Riders, male and female, black and white, boarded two separate scheduled buses (not charters), in Washington DC with plans to travel to New Orleans via Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.  Along the way they planned to challenge the laws that segregated the buses and the stations where they stopped.  They publicly stated they might face harassment or arrest, but naively expected it to go fairly smoothly.  Their hopes were raised by the fact that they had made it to Atlanta almost without incident.  Those hopes were dashed when one bus was set upon in Anniston, Alabama and set on fire with the passengers still inside.  The other bus made it to Birmingham, where a large mob attacked and severely beat the Riders.

These incidents and those that followed shone a bright light on segregation in the South, and the brutal violence some were willing to use to maintain it, often with the tacit approval of political leaders.  They exposed the Kennedy administration’s initial indifference to the civil rights movement.  Even Martin Luther King was diminished in the eyes of some of the Riders for his refusal to join them.

This documentary is a vivid reminder to us comfortably ensconced in Canada that, within living memory, such brutal violations of human rights were taking place in the so-called bastion of freedom and democracy.

For the case I’m going to recount, some of you may be too young to remember it, while others who followed it at the time, like me, have long since forgotten it.  While I will be sketching the entire case through to its ultimate outcome, the details of the case are heartbreaking, and must be experienced through the viewing of this documentary.

In 1989, five black New York teenagers – Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yussef Salaam – were charged with the brutal rape of  Trisha Meili, the so-called Central Park jogger, who was found in the park near death on the same night that all five had been in the park causing general mischief.  All five confessed to the crime, four of them doing so on videotape.  All soon recanted their confessions as they claimed the confessions were obtained under coercive interrogations by the police, interrogations which were not videotaped.  Despite these recantations, and that there were numerous factual inconsistencies among the confessions, and the fact that there was no physical evidence tying the defendants to the crime scene, including an unidentified DNA sample, all five were convicted and given maximum sentences.

All five completed their sentences and were released back into the community but were all registered as sex offenders.  Raymond Santana was later convicted on a drug charge and was given a longer sentence than normal due to his prior conviction on the Jogger case.

In 2002, a man by the the name of Matias Reyes, already serving a life sentence for other crimes, and having a belated attack of conscience, confessed to being the sole attacker in the Jogger case, claiming he had acted alone.  The specific details of his confession were entirely consistent with the crime, and his DNA matched the previously unidentified sample found at the scene.  Based on the recommendation of the District Attorney, Henry Morgenthau, all convictions against the five related to the Jogger case were vacated.  Raymond Santana was also released from prison.  All five were removed from the sex offender registry.

In 2003, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Jr., and Antron McCray sued the city for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress.  The suit was only recently settled in late 2013.  Although the rush to justice seems obvious, no-one involved in the prosecution of this case has ever admitted any wrongdoing, either through malice or negligence.

“Would you want the right to choose when it’s time?”  So goes the tagline for the winner of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for Documentaries.

In 1994 Oregon became the first state in the United States to pass a Death With Dignity law that gave terminally ill patients the option to end their life at a time of their choosing with the concurrence of two physicians.  As of 2011 500 people have exercised that option and about 250 have actually taken the life-ending drugs.  The rest have died naturally but had the drugs on hand had they chosen to use them.

This is really two stories in one.  The first shows us how the Oregon law has worked and is working, and the second is the campaign to have a similar law put in place in the State of Washington.

The Oregon part of the documentary follows several people as they exercise their death with dignity option, but focuses on one particularly heart-wrenching case, that being a 54 year-old woman by the name of Cody Curtis.  She was diagnosed with a liver cancer, the only treatment for which was surgery.  While she got immediate relief, the cancer eventually returned more aggressively with no more effective treatment possible.  When she was told she had 6 months or less to live, she exercised her death with dignity option and put everything in place.  Her story takes us on her emotional roller-coaster of plateauing during palliative care – to quote her, she was feeling “quite perky” – to the very quick drop off in feelings of wellness, to the point where she and her loved ones knew it was time.

In Washington Nancy Niedzielski talks about the love of her life, her husband Randy, and his agonizing treatment for, and death from brain cancer.  Palliative care service could not provide him the means to end his life, so he was forced to suffer and his wife to witness his slow and painful death.  Before he died, Randy extracted a promise from Nancy that she would do all she could to get a death with dignity law in place in Washington.  Her efforts took the form of her being a leading advocate for Ballot Initiative I-1000, which called for a Death With Dignity law similar to Oregon’s.  You’ll have to watch the film to see the result.

I’m generally in favor of having the death with dignity option in place so it all sounded reasonable to me.  However, I have a quarrel with the film’s producers in that they presented almost no pause for concern about such a law, save the case of Oregon resident Randy Stroup.  The State of Oregon health authorities denied him coverage for prostate cancer treatment because his 5-year survival prognosis was poor.  However, they said they would cover the cost of the death with dignity option, which would be much less expensive.  This raises an important question.  Will governments and private insurance companies continue to pay for treatments that have a poor prognosis when a much less costly option is in place?  To put it bluntly: treatment is expensive; death is cheap.

I recommend that you also watch at least one deleted scene: that of Dr. Charles Bentz, an Oregon physician who has exercised his choice to not participate in the death with dignity option.  Instead, he is a strong advocate for improved end-of-life care.  While his interview has overtones of persecution, his is a voice that ought to have been heard in the main documentary.