In Dawn Porter’s powerful documentary When A Witness Recants, Ta-Nehisi Coates serves as both executive producer and occasional subject, presenting a heart-rending tale of American injustice that is reminiscent of his high school days. The story of three black boys who were wrongly convicted of murdering their classmate (and later sentenced to life in prison) spans decades and functions as both an archival portrait of 1980s Baltimore and a retrospective true-crime investigation. But the conclusion was completely unexpected and completely devastating.
The film is based on Jennifer Gonnerman’s 2021 New Yorker article of the same name. The article begins with the gory details of a shooting in the hallway of Harlem Park Middle School in which 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett was killed in a botched robbery. Porter, on the other hand, broadens our view of the incident by having Coates set the cultural stage from the top down through his memories of growing up in Maryland and the reminiscences of his community. This also introduces the film’s major characters, including Alfred Chesnutt, Andrew Stewart, and Ransom Watkins, a trio of beleaguered illegal suspects now in their fifties who have finally been released from prison.
The film doesn’t shy away from this outcome, nor does it allow Coates to continue to welcome their case as a bystander. Instead, Coates and Porter hand over the reins of the story to the trio. Through the film’s clever cross-cutting interviews, they are finally able to take control of their own narratives (one of which begins with a moving image of an empty seat; Duckett’s absence looms large over their lives).
Meanwhile, legal depositions from 2022, consisting of both black witnesses to the crime and white investigators, serve as a secondary interview source, allowing those involved to confess or completely deny their role in this miscarriage of justice. Ultimately, this bifurcated structure focused on the recent present gives way to a narrative of time and place with an atmosphere of both wistfulness and pain, as 1983 news footage and archival video gradually become the film’s new lingua franca. Porter employs the talents of Philadelphia cartoonist Daoud Anyabwile (in lieu of live-action reenactments) for all parts of the story that aren’t readily available. His stark black-and-white motion comics depict the accused trio and the teens manipulated into testifying against them as young boys in impossible predicaments, with their futures at stake.
As can be inferred from these descriptions, Porter takes a number of visual approaches, all of which are justified given the temporal and emotional breadth the film must cover. “When a Witness Recantes” reverse-engineers its subjects’ current predicament by revisiting the gory details of the case and how Chesnutt, Stewart, and Watkins first came under the police microscope (i.e., almost randomly). There’s little mystery to all the cheating and witness tampering, and there’s virtually no gray area the film can tread into. There is no interest in relitigating cases that have already been reopened and closed, albeit decades too late.
Rather, Porter’s concern is with the enormous emotional toll these events took, both for the trio themselves, known as the “Harlem Park Three” as well as the similarly wrongfully convicted “Central Park Five,” and for their classmate Ron Bishop, one of the witnesses forced to testify falsely against them at the time. These ramifications are captured with dramatic rigor, from the family’s anguish in the aftermath to their own survival mechanisms in the years that follow (both inside the prison and outside the walls). But just as interesting as what each man immediately shares is what they carry on their chests, and many visual details that go unnoticed in the film and its narration.
As viewers, we are left to draw our own conclusions from the trio’s matching “HP3” necklaces (are they somehow bonded by a common trauma, perhaps in ways they don’t realize?) and the fleeting courtroom sketches of their trial, where they are portrayed as large and dangerous adults, despite their docile stature at 16 years old. The captivity and trial of black boys as adults in the United States was a continuing illegality, and may even have contributed to the criminal convictions of black boys at the time. No one says it outright in the film, but Anyabwile’s sketches actually work to rehumanize them in the face of the society and institutions that once robbed them of everything from their youth to the benefit of the doubt to the promise of their respective futures.
Perhaps the film’s narrative masterpiece is that even as it approaches the momentary catharsis of the man’s case being reversed, it doesn’t stop there. Instead, its extended final act tracks not only their lives in the aftermath of being locked up in prison for decades, but also the shocking lack of closure to what’s been done to them in the form of a filmed showdown that allows them the release they so desperately crave. To interpret this story in the context of justice delayed or finally achieved would be a betrayal of what the trio had to endure. Even the most enjoyable moments in When the Witness Retracts are framed within a larger story of justice denied, making it a thoroughly affecting work of nonfiction cinema.
