Against Our Better Nature

MVFHR board member Bill Babbitt is featured in a new documentary film, Against Our Better Nature. Writer and director Kenya Briggs summarizes the film this way: “What parts of ourselves do we turn away from when we kill and call it justice? In this short documentary we listen to the stories of those touched most closely by the death penalty and ask if this ultimate form of punishment is worth the real and figurative blood that it spills.”

In the 20-minute film, we hear from prison superintendents, an attorney who has handled several death penalty cases, a psychotherapist, people outside San Quentin prison protesting for and against an execution, and two people directly affected by the death penalty: Greg Wilhoit, exonerated and released from Oklahoma’s death row after having been wrongfully convicted of the murder of his wife, and Bill Babbitt, whose brother Manny was executed in California in 1999.

In the film, Greg talks about how he had initially supported the death penalty for all the others on death row – he knew he was innocent, but he believed in the death penalty for people who had actually committed the crime. After spending time on death row and seeing men he knew get executed, he realized that nobody was safer, nobody was better off, after an execution.

The film interweaves Greg’s story with Bill Babbitt’s, as Bill describes his decision to turn his mentally ill brother in to the police: “I watched them load their guns. I told them, ‘I don’t want anybody else to die. I certainly don’t want Manny to die. That’s why I came to you, so nobody else dies.’” The police told Bill that Manny would receive treatment for his paranoid schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder (Manny served two tours of duty in Vietnam and witnessed some terrible atrocities during that time), but instead he was sentenced to death. In the film, Bill says that after Manny was executed, “I didn’t want to live. I was so ashamed of myself, I wanted to kill myself.”

Like so many others who have been directly affected by violence and by the death penalty, Bill did find a way to carry on and to join in the struggle for abolition. Filmmaker Kenya Briggs is making the DVD available to activists for a reasonable purchase price, and those who want to rent it for a three-week period need only pay the shipping costs. For details about the rental agreement and public screening policies, contact Kenya at kenyabriggs@hotmail.com