Crime after Crime, in select theaters this weekend, shines a light on the number of battered women behind bars in California. The film follows two Bay Area lawyers, Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa, as they work towards justice for Deborah Peagler, a woman serving a life sentence for her part in the killing of her abuser. In 2002 California passed a law that allowed incarcerated survivors of domestic violence to present evidence of their abuse. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with the director of the film, Yoav Potash, as well as Joshua Safran to talk about the film, Deborah's story, and how this case has changed the way they view the American justice system. Below is a bit of our conversation.
Diane Davis: Did you have any idea that this one case would take this much time and energy?
Joshua Safran: No, had we know we probably wouldn't have taken the case up front... We figured this was going to be 6 months and we had a budget of $5,000 and we were on the case for about 8 years and by the end we had spent about $250,000 in hard costs.
DD: Did you have any idea what you were signing up for?
Yoav Potash: I thought I was signing up for a film that would take about a year to make. It took five and a half years but I don't regret a moment of it. It has been the most rewarding film I've ever made and I think the most important thing I've done so far in my life. I believe the film is shining an unprecedented light at this intersection of domestic violence, abuse, and criminal justice and our legal system and I think, for the most part, people are still unaware of all the pitfalls that still occur at that intersection.
DD: So California has a law that allows these kinds of cases to be looked at?
JS: In 2002 there was this new law that allowed incarcerated survivors of domestic violence to be able to tell their stories for the first time. So these were women that had already been in prison before California recognized what was then called a battered women's defense. So there are these battered women who never got to present evidence of battering and there was this nonprofit organization called the Habeas Project that went an interview all the women serving life in maximum prisons to see if battery and its effects played a role in their incarceration. So they came up with a list of about 20 women and they went to the 20 largest law firms in California and said we need you each to take one case. My co-counsel, Nadia, went to one of these presentations and came back and said, 'hey, you want to help me get a battered woman out of prison?' At the time I didn't know why but I lept at the opportunity and said, 'yeah, that sounds totally righteous. I want to do that and that will make me feel better about working for this corporate law firm.'
DD: How has this case affected your view of the justice system?
JS: I went into this case with some healthy skepticism about the justice system and I emerged believing that we are basically no better than Kazakhstan or some kind of third world country when it comes to criminal justice, whether or not you are innocent or guilty or innocent or guilty of what crime is kind of irrelavant and it is pretty arbitrary process and that is kind of frightening. Emerging from this case I kind of had the sense that if it takes a legal team 8 years of zealous and vigorous representation to get the kind of relief we tried to get for Debbie what about the millions of people that do not have that representation? What possible hope could there be for them? I fall asleep every night thinking that there are probably hundreds of thousands of Debbies out there that have no business being in prison. Yet we are spending lots and lots of tax dollars keeping them in there and it's pretty scary. To me I view it as... I'm kind of a patriot and I view it as, frankly, un-American. It feels like the kind of thing you might read about in Syria but not America and I think that I kind of view it as a challenge that we should all get inspired to do something about it.
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