9:59

there's just a real disconnect about where

10:02

we channel those feelings. Right.

10:04

And that's why that was how you chose

10:06

to present and argue the case.

10:09

It strikes me that you could have made,

10:12

or someone who wanted to make

10:14

an argument pointing out the excesses

10:17

of the recall could have made three

10:19

arguments. One is that a six month sentence

10:21

was fine and sufficient. I haven't heard

10:23

too many people making that. One is more

10:25

of a judicial discretion argument, which

10:27

is that, Even if the judge got it

10:30

wrong, it's important not to have, say, mandatory

10:32

sentences or an overreaction to

10:34

a light sentence. There was a little bit of that

10:36

in there. But the bulk of

10:38

the film was a mass incarceration

10:41

argument, a competing virtues argument.

10:43

To acknowledge that the sexual

10:46

assault, the concern about sexual assault is

10:48

perfectly valid, but think about this competing

10:50

virtue of, let us now worry about

10:53

over-incarceration. And I assume

10:55

that you took that tack because you believe it, but

10:57

also because the audience that you

10:59

were presenting is too sort of the

11:01

world that, or the milieu

11:04

that you were operating in, you knew that

11:06

that would be the most resonant.

11:08

That's right. That's exactly right. The film doesn't

11:11

take a stance on the sentence. And

11:13

that is because it is complicated.

11:16

Well, the film presents a number of different views on the sentence,

11:19

including two prosecutors who opposed

11:21

the recall, but also opposed

11:23

the sentence, thought it was too lenient. But

11:26

I do think the sentence is complicated

11:28

and was often misframed by the media, which

11:30

was, you know, it was rightly reported that he

11:32

had a six month sentence and served three

11:34

months of that, which is correct, but it

11:36

fails to mention two other aspects of his sentence.

11:38

One is three years probation, and

11:41

the second is a lifetime

11:43

of registry, of having to register as a sex

11:46

offender, which I believe

11:48

is real and genuine punishment.

11:51

My previous work in 2016, I produced a film called

11:53

Untouchable That interweaves the stories

11:55

of three survivors of sexual violence with the stories

11:58

of three people who'd been convicted of sex crime.

19:59

about what policies we should enact.

20:02

What do you think? I mean, I don't disagree

20:05

with that, which is another way of saying I agree with that,

20:07

which is, but I think we can hold them

20:09

both, that we can both hold outrage

20:12

and rationality, that you can have

20:14

outrage without knee-jerk responses,

20:18

that you can hold all these values in your mind

20:20

at once. I just think, and I think

20:22

we're doing a better job of doing

20:24

that now. And I don't mean

20:26

to say that it was impossible to

20:28

do this before 2020. I

20:31

just think the media wasn't there now. It

20:34

wasn't there yet. And so

20:36

we should be there. We should learn our lesson, you know,

20:40

and we'll make mistakes again, but we should learn our

20:42

lesson from this one. And that's, you

20:44

know, that's what I hope that the film is part of that conversation.

20:47

Right. And I'll give you something constructive. We talked

20:49

about restorative justice. If we

20:52

endorse systems of restorative

20:55

justice and put it out there and have ways

20:58

to pursue restorative

21:00

justice as part of our

21:02

institutions, then it becomes

21:04

easier to point the

21:07

rudder that way, right? If

21:09

there are actual institutions that

21:12

are trying to pursue restorative

21:14

justice. When a flash point

21:16

occurs, instead of saying, We

21:19

need now to do an examination and think

21:21

about this concept that maybe

21:22

was abstract beforehand.

21:25

We have actual institutions that we installed

21:28

in a time of rationality. It becomes

21:30

a lot easier to get justice

21:33

than just hoping that our outraged

21:35

reactions at the time are properly channeled.

21:38

That's absolutely right. I couldn't agree more. We

21:41

lose rhetorically and we lose

21:43

in practice if we say, here are your

21:45

choices, nothing or long prison

21:47

sentences. We have to present

21:50

something else. And

21:53

there are people who have been doing that work in such

21:55

powerful ways for many

21:57

years that we need to lift up, that we need to strengthen.