This time she's too late. The subject of her newest PBS documentary, "Requiem
for Frank Lee Smith," had spent 14 years on Florida's death row when he died of
painful cancer 10 months before DNA testing would exonerate him of raping and
murdering 8-year-old Shandra Whitehead.
Smith was no angel.
At age 13 he was convicted of manslaughter. At 18 he was convicted of murder.
He had already spent 15 years behind bars and was on parole when he was picked
up by police in Fort Lauderdale and charged with Shandra's murder.
The murder that would attract Bikel to his case. The murder for which a jury
found him guilty. The murder that brought him a cell a few steps from the
Florida electric chair nicknamed "Old Sparky."
The murder he didn't commit.
Smith's vicious past makes this film -- which methodically traces his abuse by
the legal system -- no less important or fascinating. Or his case any less
sympathetic to Bikel, one of television's premier documentary filmmakers since
the 1970s, including 15 productions for "Frontline." Although her films aren't
magic wands that right wrongs, her camera wields the power to mobilize public
opinion through exposure.
Miscarriages of justice fire her passion.
"The thing about crime that blows my mind is that people have no idea," she
said by phone from New York City. "They don't realize that once you're
sentenced, being innocent makes no difference. They could execute you knowing
you're innocent. People know nothing about it."
And she does know? This petite, blond-frosted, elegant, expensively turned-out
woman (we'll call her "mature") who wears big, tinted glasses and seals herself
from street crime in her apartment above Central Park? Some impassioned
crusader, some scruffy revolutionary.
"Are you kidding? I'm no revolutionary," protested Bikel in the soft hybrid
voice (she's from Israel and attended college in Paris) heard in her films.
"I'm a middle-class person. I love pretty furniture. I love jewelry. What I'm
drawn to is the difference between perception and reality. If you like the
system, be my guest. But at least know what it is. It's not a trial system,
it's a plea-bargain system. It really gripes me when people say this is not a
perfect system but it's the best in the world."
It griped her when she was making her 1990s "Innocence Lost" trilogy in
tiny Edenton, N.C., where she initially resisted going because "I was told it
was a little town that doesn't have a big hotel and doesn't take American
Express." The yield was remarkable, though, an award-laden work documenting an
odyssey of anguish endured by jailed defendants in a sexual abuse case at a
day-care center called Little Rascals, shades of the McMartin preschool case.
The two convictions, both leading to life sentences, were overturned as Bikel's
third film in the series was about to air.
It griped her too when making "The Case for Innocence," whose three
profiled "lifers" were set free in 2000, months after the film reported on DNA
testing that appeared to confirm their claims of innocence regarding rape and
murder.
It griped her when making "An Ordinary Crime," the documentary that whipped up
public opinion that ultimately threw open Garner's cell. "All I wanted to do
was get this boy out," she said. "It was such a setup. He obviously didn't do
it."
It griped her, finally, when she was planning her latest film. "There was one
more case, which we began to investigate and didn't have time to finish,'' says
narrator Will Lyman to start the documentary. "And it haunted us, so we decided
to go back to it two years later. It was the story of Frank Lee Smith."
It was a story that Bikel had wanted to include in "The Case for Innocence,"
but she ran out of air time. A story turning on a disputed confession and
mistaken identity from a police sketch by a woman named Chiquita Lowe, who
later recanted and identified someone else after Smith was already on death row.
Where he stayed ... and stayed ... and stayed, his life "passing in aging mug
shots," says Lyman, as on the screen prison photographs through the years show
Smith's gradual atrophy.
Just as several jurors in the Little Rascals case confided to Bikel they bowed
to the majority's will and voted "guilty" despite having strong doubts, Lowe
says she had her own reservations when naming Smith at his trial. But she caved
in to pressure from family, friends and police, she says, before later
identifying another African American, Eddie Lee Mosley, as the killer.
That didn't persuade authorities, though, and it was only much later, after he
had died at age 52, that DNA tests cleared Smith and appeared to confirm
Mosley, who is now in a mental institution, as Shandra's rapist-slayer.
The film's most persuasive indictment, though, targets police and prosecutors,
and its only serious flaw is in finding no motive, beyond stubbornness, for
their inexplicable refusal to bend on Smith's guilt.
Why Smith? "It was easy," Bikel said on the phone. "He had a record. He was a
nobody. He didn't have a family. Why not Frank Smith? This is the justice of
the black poor." Of course, Mosley also is black and poor.
What surfaces here beyond legal injustice are implicit arguments for DNA
testing and against capital punishment.
In Smith's case, the wrong man was headed for execution, just as those featured
in other Bikel films appear to have been unjustly convicted and locked away.
Meanwhile, the woman whose original accusation sent Smith to prison is shown
visiting his unmarked grave. Chiquita Lowe says she is saving money to buy him
a headstone.
Originally published in the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2002. Reprinted by permission.
home + eight things to know + closer look + smith's long hard life + ofra bikel
producer chat + introduction + discussion + video + links & readings
tapes & transcripts + press reaction + credits + privacy policy
FRONTLINE + wgbh + pbsi
web site copyright WGBH educational foundation
| 
