The Exonerated

The Exonerated is a dramatic play written and directed, in its premiere, by American playwrights Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank. First released in 2002, it profiles six Americans who were wrongly convicted and given death sentences; they spent a cumulative total of more a century in prison before being exonerated. The characters are based on real individuals whom the playwrights interviewed extensively while writing their story. The Exonerated illuminates some of the most serious and urgent flaws in the American justice system, affirming that its frequent undue criminalization of innocent people amounts to a state-committed atrocity. At the same time, it humanizes the plights of the wrongly incarcerated, showing that they were able to see the humor and beauty in some of the most inconceivably bleak situations.

The entire play is set on a stage that is undecorated, and its characters are dressed in everyday clothes. The actors, seated on simple chairs, act, enter, and exit without a single intermission. One of the convicted characters, Delbert, delivers an opening speech in which he warns against depending on a rational explanation for the things that happen in life. The other convicted members introduce themselves: Gary was wrongly accused of murdering his parents; Robert was wrongly accused of raping and murdering a white girl by two racist cops who staged themselves as legitimate witnesses; Kerry, also accused of murdering a white girl with flimsy forensic evidence; David, racially profiled and pressured into a false admission of killing a cop; Sunny, successfully accused of a double homicide by the actual murderer; and lastly, Delbert, who was also convicted on the basis of a racial profile.

During the course of the play, each character retells his or her story leading up to his or her arrest or conviction. The false convictions follow a general, frustrating, and predictable pattern: most of them were accused because of their race or some other stereotype, and prosecuted aggressively and blindly due to the miasma of racism and prejudice that infiltrates most corners of American society. For example, Delbert was arrested by white cops, prosecuted by white lawyers, and charged by a white jury – all after he volunteered to cooperate and accepted extradition. Kerry’s prosecutors profiled him as misogynistic, appealing to homophobia and stereotyping to build a case against him. Sunny criticizes her prosecutors, who illegally suppressed evidence supporting her innocence to speed their victory along. David was interrogated without a real chance to obtain legal counsel and without even being told he was suspected of murder, which resulted in his false confession under the unbearable psychological pressure.



All wrongly convicted, they recall their reaction to their death sentence. All of them reacted with shock and despair to the outcome that they were going to be legally, wrongfully murdered. They hardly knew how to conceive of the occasions of their deaths, suddenly rendered so certain and concrete. Delbert likens the image of the electric chair to his prior job at a university lab, where similar electrodes were used to examine his dreams. While in jail, the other wrongfully convicted found their own distinct ways of coping with their imminent executions. David relates his time in the solitude of prison to the individual’s search for an elusive god. Kerry connects his situation to the universal precarity of all people’s fates, especially as he watches countless people die on death row before him. Gary embraces his vulnerability as an inmate without the support of a gang and learns to sew using a smuggled needle.

The characters suffer greatly while incarcerated. Though they inhabited different prisons, many of the wrongfully accused were abused by their guards. Kerry, who does not identify as gay but was portrayed as such in his trial, was raped repeatedly and attempted suicide. Robert’s guards harassed him to the point that he begged the judge to intervene. The prisoners’ terms lasted an average of twenty years each. They were set free for various reasons, ranging from a DNA test that proved innocence (as in Kerry’s case) to a sudden confession from the real murderer (which exonerated Gary).

At the end of the play, Delbert repeats his cautionary speech from the play’s opening scene about the capriciousness of fate. The six wrongfully convicted individuals lament that their lives as they knew them were needlessly and mercilessly destroyed. Nonetheless, they come away not with ambivalence, resentment, or cynicism, but as graceful survivors and advocates of justice reform.