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I first heard William Faulkner’s quote “To understand the world you must first understand a place like Mississippi” from Chris Routh, former Hinds County deputy public defender.
These words were an invitation that would come to resonate far more deeply over the next five years as my husband and I traversed across the state, two parts of a small but mighty filmmaking team behind The Dead Zone, a Sundance-supported feature documentary exploring the presumption of innocence in America.
As a documentarian, I embed myself in people’s lives, sometimes for years, to intimately understand their lived experiences in pursuit of telling stories that reveal something deeper about the human condition and the systems that shape us.
Faulkner’s words took on a complicated duality. The state became both a cautionary tale – a place where the failures of our criminal legal system are impossible to ignore – and a source of unexpected hope for what it might take to confront one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time.
When I first embarked on this film back in 2021, America was experiencing a racial reckoning over social injustices and a surge of criminal justice reforms ensued. Progressive prosecutors were elected across the country and public sentiment in favor of bail reform gained momentum.
However, as fears of rising crime skyrocketed, and tensions over constitutional rights exploded, criminal justice reforms started to go in a pendulum swing. Our cultural and political silos made it nearly impossible to collaborate on meaningful solutions.
Nearly 400,000 people were stuck in jail before trial, presumed innocent. This is the equivalent of nearly every Ole Miss homegame football attendee over the course of a season being detained behind bars.
I set out to understand this issue, why the pretrial population had skyrocketed and how our so-called ideals – like the presumption of innocence, due process, equality under the law – clashed with our lived realities.
I originally set out to explore issues like cash bail, unlawful detention and their relationship to community safety. Yet an old adage in filmmaking is that you might start with an idea of what your film is, but over time the true film will reveal itself to you. And if you end in the same place you started, it probably wasn’t that good of a story in the first place.
After speaking with dozens of legal experts, directly impacted people, advocates and law enforcement officers, I realized I needed to take a systemic approach and document the story from multiple perspectives inside the system – public defenders, judges, prosecutors and the accused.
One name kept emerging from across our conversations: Public Defender Chris Routh in Jackson. It turned out Mississippi was part of the epicenter of change and hope where I needed to be. The story was revealing itself.
The night before we met Chris, my husband and I sampled beers at Fertile Ground brewery to ease into the filming week in Jackson. The next day we drove to the Hinds County Public Defender’s office downtown. The receptionist buzzed us in, and I immediately noticed the flickering fluorescent lights, magazines from years past scattered across the lobby coffee tables, and a few Christmas decorations still up despite it being May.
But what really caught my eye was a sign on a wall that said: “I hear much of people’s calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.” Daniel Defoe.
We sat down and got to know Chris and Chief Public Defender Gail Lowry. Little did they know that this first meeting would inspire a years-long collaboration in the making of this film. We embedded in their office and in Hinds County courtrooms observing quietly and patiently as their undersized but dedicated team took on thousands of cases – from bail hearings to trials – during record turnover.
Over the course of the first year of our filming, their office lost 10 out of 12 lawyers, all of them to higher paying positions that the defender’s office couldn’t match.
Chris and Gail persevered through the storm, working tirelessly to bring in additional funding, attract, train and retain new lawyers all the while managing their own heavy caseloads. A Sisyphean call, but an essential one.
About 80% of defendants in Mississippi require a public defender, yet it’s one of just five states in the country that lack a statewide public defender system.
This is one reason Andre de Gruy, state public defender for Mississippi, has been fighting to address a lack of public defenders, a shortage exacerbated by a myriad of issues like poverty, lack of alternatives to pretrial detention and prosecutorial accountability.
These factors created the perfect storm of people waiting years for their trial in overcrowded jails not convicted of any crime. The gruesome reality of this limbo is that an estimated two people die every day in jail in America awaiting trial.
Unique to Mississippi, the accused oftentimes lack consistent public defenders and could be held with no time limit. This limbo is referred to as the “Dead Zone,” a term used by Jerry Mitchell who reported on this situation.
Attorney Michael Carr, who represented indigent clients in the Delta, also told us that to understand the human toll of the Dead Zone we had to talk to one man in particular: Duane Lake.
Duane Lake stands for a portrait outside the abandoned Coahoma County Jail in Clarksdale, Mississippi on Jan. 10, 2022. He spent six years in jailfor a crime in didn’t commit. The case against him was dismissed. Credit: Rory Doyle/MCIRDuane grew up in Clarksdale, and was the father of three young children at the time he was arrested for a triple homicide. He went on to spend over six years trapped in a mold and rat-infested jail awaiting trial. His charge carried the threat of the death penalty and legislators had been floating bringing back death by firing squad at one point.
For three of those years, Duane was stuck in legal limbo without a lawyer – the Dead Zone – because there was no one to represent him between his arrest and his indictment. His indictment took three years in part due to how infrequently the grand jury meets and a lack of available defenders.
We met Duane about a year after a jury found him not guilty. He had moved out of state to Kentucky to rebuild his life. Unlike someone who is convicted and later exonerated, Duane was not entitled to any compensation or recourse because he was held pretrial. Not even an apology.
Like Chris, Duane embraced us cautiously but with open arms. We first filmed him making Mississippi soul food delicacies in his new home in Louisville: grits with plenty of butter and a little bit of sugar. Very quickly, Duane let us into his world and opened up to us, letting us document his journey of building a new life while confronting the realities of what he had just lived through and lost.
Filmmakers inhabit a privileged but complex role. Those privileges include seeing the world through new perspectives and getting to witness the lives of others.
In Jackson, we traveled through elevators at the state public defender’s office gilded with reliefs of Robert E. Lee (the building’s original namesake), through the breezy doors of Hal and Mal’s restaurant, up the carpeted stairs of First Baptist Church for public safety speakouts and through the speakeasy hallway behind Brent’s drugs in Jackson’s Fondren community.
We sampled hot tamales in Cleveland, on the way to the crossroads of Clarksdale and savored the best gumbo we’ve ever had – homemade by Chris himself. We filmed wind turbines whipping in the horizon as cotton rows – an omnipresent reminder of the state’s past – reflected hazy pink sunsets along the Delta highway.
These details may seem ancillary, but they became part of how we came to know Mississippi and, more importantly, how we came to know the people who invited us into their lives.
For us, filmmaking begins with relationships. We believe you have to build trust before you can ask someone to share the most vulnerable parts of their lives. That takes time, honesty, consistency and a willingness to be transparent about who you are, why you’re there, and what you hope to understand. It also means showing up long after the cameras stop rolling.
For us, we couldn’t look away from the injustices we came to witness and the stories we heard from Duane and Chris. We kept coming back and we kept being invited back.
From Chris to Duane and our two additional main participants – Judge Genesis Draper in Houston and Memphis District Attorney Steve Mulroy – this story revealed itself as a powerful, intimate portrait of our country at a crucial inflection point and of the people on the frontlines protecting our justice system against insurmountable odds. Our film asks us all to ponder: Do we still uphold and believe in the core values we claim to? Or is the presumption of innocence dead?
Chris and Duane showed us the importance of keeping on this story, why it matters and the impact it could make. Through all four of our protagonists’ personal journeys, we observed challenges to improving a system that was designed to be broken, but also opportunities for change and above all, the importance of bearing witness.
By cutting through partisan politics and courtroom silos, we hope our film can disarm preconceived notions allowing audiences to embrace a different trajectory forward – one that puts humanity, equality and compassion on a pedestal.
In late 2023, inspired in large part by Duane’s story, Mississippi passed legislation ending the Dead Zone. By law, people who can’t afford a lawyer are now entitled to continuous representation throughout the pretrial process starting from their initial appearance. In theory no longer will a person go without a lawyer between arrest and indictment like Duane.
Mississippi state Public Defender André de Gruy stands in front of his office in Jackson in May 2025. Credit: Imani Khayyam for The Marshall ProjectEarlier this year, Gail Lowry fought and received additional funding for the Hinds County public defenders office. Andre de Gruy is working with groups like the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center to forward new pilot programs across the state to dramatically decrease unnecessary lengthy pretrial detention and provide adequate representation from the start.
Indeed, Faulker was right that Mississippi is a lens through which we can better understand our country, and the world.
When we widen the lens, Mississippi could still be the example for the rest of the country. The cradle of our nation’s most challenging issues could also possess the heart of our greatest solutions.
Emily Thomas is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer and founder of Lemon Tree Productions. Her work is rooted in intimately documenting the human experience to illuminate pressing social justice and environmental issues. She recently was the cinematographer on Baby Doe (SXSW ‘25), the associate producer of Bodyguard of Lies (Tribeca ‘25, Paramount+), and director of Last Days at Paradise High (The New Yorker). As a cinematographer, she has worked on films for Netflix, VICE, The New Yorker, PBS and Frontline. Previously, she was a journalist for VICE, Storyful and The Huffington Post, and was an open source investigator at the Human Rights Center. She is a PGA Create alum, a Prison Journalism Project mentor and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is currently directing the feature documentary, The Dead Zone, and is based in Baltimore.
The Dead Zone documentary is currently in post-production, to learn more or to bring a screening of the film to your community and be part of the impact campaign get in touch with the film team here: www.deadzonefilm.com/
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