| Summary |
"About the wrongful conviction of Joseph Majczek and his codefendant Theodore Marcinkiewicz who were wrongly convicted for the February 1933 murder of a Chicago policeman. The movie stars Jimmy Stewart as the enterprising Chicago Times reporter who after being initially skeptical, found proof the men were innocent after responding to a classified ad by Majczek's mother seeking help. His mother had worked for years scrubbing floors to save $5,000 to offer as a reward for information that would exoenrate her son. Majczek was pardoned in 1945 after 12 years of wrongful imprisonment. Majczek was called Frank Wiecek in the movie. Majczek had been sentenced to 99 years, and there had been no physical evidence of his guilt. He was convicted solely on the eyewitness testimony of one woman, who had seen the accused man on several occasion after his arrest, but prior to her formally identifying him in a lineup as the “shooter.” This was finally proved by blowing up a picture of the two of them going into a police station in the company of several policemen. In the background was a newsboy holding a pile of newspapers. The date of the newspaper was blown up and this established that the woman saw Majczek before she identified him in the line-up. She didn’t identify him because he was the murderer, but because his face was familiar to her because she saw him just prior to identifying him in a line-up. Majczek had also been questioned non-stop for several days, which disorientated him enough to provide conflicting statements to the police about his whereabouts and what he was doing at the time the murders occurred, although neither he nor his co-defendant confessed to the murder at any time." |