Justice, Texas Style

This post originally ran April 16, 2009.

Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie) gets a taste of Texas law.

American Violet
Directed by Tim Disney
Written by Bill Haney
Starring Nicole Beharie, Tim Blake Nelson, Will Patton, Michael O’Keef, Xzibit, Malcolm Barrett, Charles S. Dutton, Alfre Woodard, Tim Ware, and David Paul Story

By Robert Rosen

The French news is carried on cable and satellite systems throughout America, and if you ever watched it during the years that George W. Bush was governor of Texas, you may have been struck by the peculiar way the French covered the Lone Star State, particularly on those all-too-frequent days when it was executing (or Texecuting, as some called it) yet another prisoner.

If you didn’t know any better, you might have thought that Texas wasn’t part of the United States. Rather, that big red blot on the map appeared to be a country unto itself—a banana republic ruled by a bloodthirsty and possibly insane dictator, somebody along the lines of, say, Saddam Hussein. Because it was under Bush’s authority that Texas put to death 155 men and women, virtually all of whom were poor, and many of whom were insane, mentally retarded, innocent, a juvenile at the time the crime was committed, or, of course, black.

What kind of barbaric justice system was this? the French wondered. How could such things routinely happen in a country that called itself civilized? You don’t have to be French to ask those questions anymore. And if you ever have asked them, American Violet would be a good place to begin to understand how Texas justice works.

The film, however, isn’t about executions, which are just the most malignant symptom of a justice system run amok. Instead, American Violet is a composite of a number of true stories about a corrupt method of law enforcement that was practiced in Texas frequently and with relish: A district attorney orders the police to carry out a military-style drug raid in an African-American community. Scores of innocent people are arrested, essentially anybody who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And on the basis of manufactured evidence, these people are given a choice: Accept a felony plea bargain, which would allow them to leave prison immediately but strip them of numerous rights, including the right to vote. Or go to trial defended by an incompetent and corrupt legal-aid attorney and face decades in prison. Most people, of course, take the plea bargain.

American Violet takes place in the days surrounding the 2000 election, as Bush ascends from a mere governor to the president of the United States. It focuses on Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie), a single mother of four young girls, who works as a waitress and aspires to a better life. Following a raid on her housing project in the fictional town of Melody, she’s arrested when a police informant accuses her of selling crack. She’s innocent, but unlike her neighbors, rather than accept a plea bargain, Dee chooses to fight the system, assisted by ACLU attorney David Cohen (Tim Blake Nelson) and Sam Conroy (Will Patton), a local lawyer who risks everything to do what’s right. When the charges are dropped, Dee, on the advice of her attorneys, sues the local district attorney, Calvin Beckett (Michael O’Keefe).

Beharie is brilliant and beautiful as Dee, a courageous victim of gross injustice who overcomes impossible odds, taking her place in a long line of Hollywood heroines like Norma Rae, Erin Brockovich, and Karen Silkwood. O’Keefe is perfectly sleazy as Beckett, the racist DA. Nelson somehow manages to make you root for his smug and not terribly sympathetic Cohen, which is a good trick. And Patton makes his good-ole-boy lawyer, Conroy, seem real despite his decision to ostensibly ruin his career, and possibly his life, by agreeing to help Cohen.

In the hands of less talented actors, these stereotypical characters would have seemed like cardboard puppets mouthing lines of agitprop. Which is to say American Violet—so titled because of the indomitable qualities of the flower, which Dee cultivates—is by no means a perfect movie. The plot is obvious—you know where it’s going and how it’s going to get there long before it finishes—and the characters’ motivations are just too pat.

But it’s undeniably a powerful, infuriating film that should be seen by anybody who cares about living in a country where a grotesque justice system routinely commits atrocities in the name of its citizens.