Law & Justice in the Other New York

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 49
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Brother’s Keeper

Sometime in the small hours of June 7th, 1990, poor dirt farmer William Ward died in his bed. He was 64 years old and had been in failing health for some time. Police initially accepted this as just something that happens. But a hotshot medical examiner soon found slight irregularities in William’s remains and proclaimed foul play. Police quickly arrested William’s youngest surviving brother, Delbert, charging him with “mercy killing.”

Documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky built their career around following people that the media world gawks at without bothering to understand. They created a trilogy of documentaries surrounding the West Memphis Three, the poster children for the 1980s Satanic Panic. They also worked extensively with the rock band Metallica. After Sinofsky’s passing, Berlinger directed Netflix’s highly controversial Jeffrey Dahmer biopic, continuing his love of spectacle.

Berlinger and Sinofsky were attracted to William Ward’s murder, and Delbert’s trial, not because of events themselves, but because of the media circus surrounding them. The four Ward brothers farmed their ancestral patch outside Munnsville, a central New York village that (to judge by this film) has few residents younger than forty. The Wards themselves had lived their entire lives on the farm, with electricity but no running water.

Our filmmakers struggle to let the Ward brothers tell their own stories. Problem is, the Ward brothers aren’t very helpful. While Berlinger and Sinofsky’s interview subjects mostly interact well with the camera and explain themselves in measured tones, Delbert Ward and his brothers, Lyman and Roscoe, are visibly uncomfortable. The documentarians have to leave their questions in the edit, because the Ward brothers consistently give uncomfortable one-word answers.

Much media speculation around the Ward murder, as recounted in this documentary, centers on the Wards’ simple lifestyles. Slick-suited downstate journalists loved to interview the brothers, and their neighbors, keeping them centered on camera so the world could hear their regional accents and see their paucity of teeth. None of the brothers ever married; though they seem amiable with Munnsville women, there’s little evidence any has ever had a relationship.

By contrast, Berlinger and Sinofsky aim their cameras at the journalists and their polished crews. While urbane news crews in fashionable late-eighties businesswear get multiple takes to perfect their location shoots, they let Delbert Ward ramble incoherently, and broadcast the first take. Berlinger and Sinofsky show the contrast between supercilious journalists, and the way Munnsville’s people close ranks to protect Delbert Ward, whom they consider a neighbor.

Delbert Ward (right) and his attorney, as they hear the verdict

Unfortunately, Munnsville’s attitude toward the Wards proves as patronizing as the city slickers. Several Munnsville residents give on-camera interviews, but fumble through their cliched, condescending narratives of “neighbors” they clearly don’t know well. Several Munnsville residents spin fictional justifications of why Delbert couldn’t possibly be guilty, or why he is, but it’s secretly okay. Many describe the Ward brothers as simple-minded, rusticating, and possibly mentally disabled.

That last characterization proves prescient when Delbert’s defense attorney deploys it in his opening argument. Ralph Cognetti literally claims Delbert couldn’t have murdered William because he’s too simple-minded—the same argument the nameless defense attorney uses in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying. Delbert’s attorney, his neighbors, and distant supporters defend him using the same accusation the state uses: these are just hill people, with all the stereotypes.

New York state police based their entire argument on two facts: William’s body had petechial hemorrhaging, and Delbert signed a confession. (They also claim they found semen on William’s corpse, a lurid detail presumably used to bait the media, since it’s never pursued further.) The problem with Delbert’s signed confession is, by his own admission, Delbert can barely read. His entire understanding of justice comes from watching Matlock.

Berlinger and Sinofsky follow the Ward brothers and their Munnsville neighbors through the months preceding the trial, and the trial itself. Their depiction of a murder trial is chilling. Stripped of Dick Wolf’s beloved melodrama, the process appears degrading and spiteful. Lyman Ward handles cross-examination so poorly, I briefly thought he’d died on the stand. It’s enough to make one wonder whether trials are about justice at all.

It spoils nothing to admit: Delbert is acquitted, but not exonerated. This movie isn’t about the outcome anyway. It’s about the conflict between outsiders and the community, the way downstate police and prosecutors (and their media allies) hunted for a murderer before proving a murder actually happened, while the working-class community closed ranks to defend their own. The product is chilling, an indictment of the justice system itself.