[Sundae]

I went to see a play called The Exonerated.
It's actors using the real words of people held on Death Row before being freed. As far as I remember none of them received compensation. It's incredibly moving.

Culled from interviews, letters, transcripts, case files, and the public record, The Exonerated tells the true stories of six people sent to Death Row for crimes they did not commit. In this 90 minute, intermissionless play, we meet Kerry, a sensitive Texan brutalized on Texas' death row for 22 years before being freed by DNA evidence; and Gary, a Midwestern organic farmer condemned for the murder of his own parents and later exonerated when two motorcycle gang members confess to the crime. We are introduced to Robert, an African-American horse groomer who spent seven years on Florida's death row for the murder of a white woman before evidence emerged that the victim was found clutching hair from a Caucasian attacker. We hear from David, a shy man with aspirations to the ministry, bullied into confessing at 18 to a robbery/murder he had nothing to do with, scarred from a youth spent in prison and struggling to regain his faith; and from Sunny, a bright-spirited hippie who spent 17 years in prison, along with her husband, for the murder of two police officers while another suspect had written a confession that was repeatedly discounted by authorities. And we meet Delbert, a poet who serves as the play's center, convicted of a rape/murder in the Deep South of the 1970s and later freed when evidence surfaced suggesting that he was not even in the state when the crime occurred. Moving between first-person monologues and scenes set in courtrooms and prisons, the six interwoven stories paint a picture of an American criminal justice system gone horribly wrong and of six brave souls who persevered to survive it.