![]() “Conviction” chronicles the months the detective spends stalking the Morrisania neighborhood in the South Bronx, on a hunt for exculpatory evidence. ![]() Into the breach swaggers Gomez, who is hired by the Hernandez family to root out the truth. Hernandez maintains his innocence - he insists he wasn’t anywhere near the site of the shooting - but bail is set at $250,000, and he spends more than a year in jail awaiting trial. “Conviction” focuses on the case of Pedro Hernandez, a Bronx teenager who was arrested in 2016 in a shooting during a street corner melee. Gomez specializes in the cases of poor young men, usually black and Latino, who are subject to aggressive police practices and the Kafkaesque indignities of New York’s “Blindfold Law,” which permits prosecutors to withhold nearly all the evidence against defendants until the day their trial begins. REVIEW: ‘Crime + Punishment,’ a potent documentary on the ‘NYPD12’ whistle blowers and cop turned investigator » These conflicts are embodied by the series’ central figure, Gomez, a garrulous former cop, now private investigator, who calls himself “a punisher of the wicked … a bringer of justice for the good.” Figuratively speaking, “Conviction” is all about watches that are really cameras and pens that are really knives: about the distance between what things appear to be and what they really are, about the moral fog that clouds distinctions between justice and vengeance, good guys and bad guys, truth and lies. Knafo is also laying thematic groundwork. He is invoking the hardboiled tradition ironically, setting us up for a real-life detective story that leaches out all traces of glamour - a darker shade of noir than any Philip Marlowe mystery. That Chandleresque introduction, like nearly all the writing in the seven-part series, is fine and sharp and gives off a gleam it’s Knafo’s pen that’s the knife. It’s a nervy move to begin a nonfiction tale of crime, cops and municipal corruption with a big sidelong wink at Raymond Chandler.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |