Who Killed Garrett Phillips? is a 2019 documentary in two parts by American film director and producer Liz Garbus.
On Oct. 24, 2011, 12-year-old Garrett Phillips was murdered in his home in Potsdam, a small town in upstate New York. Police quickly suspected Oral "Nick" Hillary, a Jamaican man in the mostly white community, who was a soccer coach at Clarkson University and the ex-boyfriend of Garrett's mother, Tandy Cyrus. The documentary chronicles the years following the murder including the interrogation, arrest, and trial for second degree murder of Nick Hillary, the prime suspect. He opted to be tried by a judge and was acquitted. [1] In the course of the trial it is revealed that public state prosecutor, Mary E. Rain withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. This, and additional instances of professional misconduct, led to Rain being banned for two years from practicing law. [2] [3]
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The film premiered on June 20, 2019, at AFI Docs Film Festival in Washington DC as part of the festival's "Truth and Justice" program. [4] It was subsequently broadcast on July 23 and 24 2019 on HBO in the US. The documentary received positive reviews. [5] [6] [7]
Christopher Allen Darden is an American lawyer, author, lecturer, and judicial candidate. He worked for 15 years in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, where he gained national attention as a co-prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
Ramush Haradinaj is a Kosovo Albanian politician, leader of the AAK party, and the third prime minister of Kosovo. He is a former officer and leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and previously served as Prime Minister of Kosovo between 2004 and 2005.
The December murders were the murders on 7, 8, and 9 December 1982, of fifteen prominent young Surinamese men who had criticized the military dictatorship then ruling Suriname. Thirteen of these men were arrested on December 7 between 2 am and 5 am while sleeping in their homes. The other two were Surendre Rambocus and Jiwansingh Sheombar who were already imprisoned for attempting a countercoup in March 1982. Soldiers of Dési Bouterse took them to Fort Zeelandia, where they were heard as "suspects in a trial" by Bouterse and other sergeants in a self-appointed court. After these "hearings" they were tortured and shot dead. The circumstances remain unclear. On 10 December 1982, Bouterse claimed on national television that all of the detainees had been shot dead "in an attempt to flee".
Malik Rahim is an American housing and prison activist based since the late 1990s in the New Orleans area of Louisiana, where he grew up. In 2005 Rahim gained national publicity as a community organizer in New Orleans in 2005 to combat the widespread destruction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; there he co-founded the Common Ground Collective.
Murder on a Sunday Morning is a 2001 documentary film directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. The documentary centers around the Brenton Butler case, in which a fifteen-year-old African-American boy was wrongfully accused of murder in Jacksonville, Florida. The film follows Butler's public defense attorneys as they piece together the narrative and how the police coerced Butler into confessing. It received critical acclaim and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 74th Academy Awards in 2002.
Amanda Marie Knox is an American author, activist, and journalist. She spent almost four years incarcerated in Italy after her wrongful conviction in the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student, with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation. In 2024, an Italian appellate court upheld Amanda Knox's slander conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher.
Joshua Earl Patrick Phillips is an American man who was convicted of murder as a child. In November 1998, when he was 14 years old, Phillips killed Madelyn Rae Clifton, his 8-year-old friend and neighbor. The following year, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Phillips stated that he killed Clifton to stop her from crying after she was accidentally struck with a baseball while they were playing, and that he feared punishment from his abusive father. Although elements of Phillips's story are disputed, officials who were involved in his prosecution have subsequently expressed contrition over the severity of his sentence. In 2017, Phillips was re-sentenced to life in prison on appeal, but he has been eligible for re-sentencing as of 2023.
The Bowraville murders is the name given to three deaths that occurred over five months from September 1990 to February 1991 in Bowraville, New South Wales, Australia. All three victims were Aboriginal, and all disappeared after parties in Bowraville's Aboriginal community, in an area known as The Mission. A local labourer, who was regarded by police as the prime suspect, was charged with two of the murders but was acquitted following trials in 1994 and 2006. On 13 September 2018, the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal decided that the man could not be retried for the murders. On 22 March 2019, the High Court of Australia refused an application by the Attorney General of New South Wales to bring an appeal against that decision.
The Brenton Butler case was a murder case in Jacksonville, Florida. During the investigation of a shooting death outside a motel in 2000, police arrested 15-year-old Brenton Butler and charged him with the murder. Butler subsequently confessed to the crime, and the case went to trial. However, during the trial he testified that he had been brutalized into his confession, and he was acquitted. The case gained significant notice in the media, and became the subject of an award-winning documentary, Murder on a Sunday Morning.
Jason William Mizell, better known by his stage name Jam Master Jay, was an American musician and DJ. He was the DJ of the influential hip hop group Run-DMC. During the 1980s, Run-DMC became one of the biggest hip hop groups and are credited with breaking hip hop into mainstream music.
The Living Ghost is a 1942 American mystery-drama film directed by William Beaudine and produced by Monogram Pictures. Starring James Dunn and Joan Woodbury, the film incorporates elements of the horror genre as it follows an ex-private detective who is called in to investigate why a banker has turned into a zombie. As the detective shares wisecracks with the banker's cheeky secretary, the two fall in love. The film was distributed in the United Kingdom under the title Lend Me Your Ear, and later released on home video as A Walking Nightmare.
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is a 2011 American documentary film directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, and sequel to their films Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996) and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000). The three films are about West Memphis Three, three teenage boys accused of the May 1993 murders and sexual mutilation of three prepubescent boys as a part of an alleged satanic ritual in West Memphis, Arkansas. Purgatory offers an update on the case of the West Memphis Three, who were all recognized guilty of the murders in 1994 but kept on claiming their innocence since then, before culminating with the trio's attempt at an Alford plea.
Odin Leonardo John Lloyd was a semi-professional American football player who was murdered by Aaron Hernandez, a former tight end for the New England Patriots of the National Football League, in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, on June 17, 2013. Lloyd's death made international headlines following Hernandez's association with the investigation as a suspect. Lloyd had been a linebacker for a New England Football League (NEFL) semi-professional football team, the Boston Bandits, since 2007.
Hae Min Lee was a Korean-American high school student who went missing on January 13, 1999, in Baltimore County, Maryland, before turning up dead on February 9, 1999, when her corpse was discovered in Leakin Park, Baltimore. Her autopsy revealed that she had been killed by way of manual strangulation.
On January 18, 2016, Daniel Leetin Shaver of Granbury, Texas, was fatally shot by police officer Philip Brailsford in the hallway of a La Quinta Inn & Suites hotel in Mesa, Arizona. Police were responding to a report that a rifle had been pointed out of the window of Shaver's hotel room.
Amanda Knox is a 2016 American documentary film about Amanda Knox, twice convicted and later acquitted of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2016, and on Netflix on September 30, 2016.
Naomi Osaka is an American documentary television miniseries directed by Garrett Bradley. It follows the life of professional tennis player Naomi Osaka over the course of two years. It consists of three episodes, and premiered on July 16, 2021, on Netflix.
Shandee Blackburn was a 23 year old woman who was murdered in Mackay, Queensland, Australia in February 2013. Blackburn's ex-boyfriend, John Peros, was initially charged with her murder, but was then acquitted in 2017 at trial. A 2019 coronial inquest, however, later identified Peros as the main suspect. A podcast by The Australian's Hedley Thomas was released in late 2021 which detailed the entirety of the case and issues concerning the investigation. As a result of the renewed interest created, the coronial inquest was reopened in February 2022.
Look at Me is a 2022 documentary film, directed by Sabaah Folayan. It focuses on the life and death of the rapper and singer-songwriter Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy, known as XXXTentacion. The film's title is named after his breakthrough single. It premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 15, 2022, and was released on Hulu on May 26, 2022.
Cynara is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Sherien Barsoum and released in 2023. The film centres on the disputed case of Cindy Ali, a Trinidadian Canadian woman from the Scarborough district of Toronto who was convicted in 2016 of murdering her 16-year-old daughter Cynara.