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No system of justice is fool-proof. No human institution is fool-proof. In France, in the UK, we can find numerous examples of judicial error and of wrongful conviction. But although such errors may cost the innocent dear, they do not take their lives. Randall Adams came within three days of execution, and spent over three years on Death Row. It was because Adams was sentenced to death that Errol Morris came to meet him, and it was because he was on Death Row that Morris made the film.

The United States is often regarded as being something of a stand-out, its retention of the death penalty an anachronism, an American peculiarity. The reality is that state executions still take place in many parts of the world. For example, the killing of criminals is current in China: no-one knows how many people are put to death by the state every year, but a recent estimate was of 5,000 in a single year.

China is, of course, an authoritarian régime. But there are democracies that also use the death penalty: India is one example – although, like other countries that keep the penalty on its statute books, it uses it very rarely. Japan and South Korea also have it. However, there does seem to be a general movement towards its abolition. Often a nation will simply stop using the punishment for some time before they actually strike it from the books.

As the sociologist David Garland points out, we cannot conclude from this that the USA is a special case. To begin with, the USA is a federation of states, and not all of them have maintained the death penalty. The state of Michigan was one of the earliest judiciaries in the world to abolish it, and did so in 1847. For comparison, France abolished the penalty in 1981: the last person executed there, a Tunisian named Hamida Djandoubi, died in 1977. In England, the last two people were hanged in 1964, accomplices in a robbery and murder. The penalty was abolished in the following year, for a trial period of five years. Abolition was later confirmed.

In the United States, the death penalty was suspended in all states for a period between 1972 and 1976, the Supreme Court having found that the laws as they stood could not guarantee equitable trials. The system was, they found, arbitrary and capricious. The different states reformed their statutes, and the Supreme Court was satisfied with the new laws; executions could begin once more.

However, as we have seen, not all US states have death penalty statutes. Of those that do, not all of them make great use of the penalty, and, to all intents and purposes, we can say that the death penalty at present is a phenomenon that is concentrated in the Southern States. Among those states, Texas is the one that executes the greatest numbers – there were 17 executions in the state in 2010.

Randall Adams and his brother Ray were making their way across the United States from Ohio, heading for somewhere warm to spend the winter. Adams suffered from arthritis, and this was particularly troublesome to him in the winter months. They were on their way to California. Ohio is a death penalty state, but actually executes very few murderers. California has more people sentenced to death than Texas, but executes less of them. One evening during their journey, stopping in Nashville, the two brothers decided not to continue to California, but to try their luck in Dallas.

After having been found guilty, Randall Adams was, as is the case in all death-penalty trials in the USA today, faced with the second phase in which the jury had to decide on the penalty. In France, or in the UK, sentencing decisions are left to the judge, and this is also the case in the US for all crimes but murder. For this crime, the Supreme Court insists upon it.

The film-maker had come to Texas to make a documentary about the notorious Dr. Grigson, often known as ‘Dr. Death’. Grigson was a psychologist who was regularly called to testify as an expert witness by the prosecution in capital cases. He was renowned for always advising that the condemned prisoner was certainly dangerous, and likely to kill again. This he did, once again, in the case of Adams. This testimony, added to the fact that Adams had killed a policeman, for no comprehensible reason (the prosecution argued that he had been trying to impress the 16-year-old David Harris), persuaded the jury to condemn Adams to death.

Because juries decide the penalty, prosecutors ask judges to exclude from death-penalty case juries anyone who has a principled objection to the death penalty such that they would be refuse to condemn someone to death. The Supreme Court has accepted such jury seeding, but does not allow the exclusion of jurors who, although they might be against the death penalty, nevertheless agree that they will abide by the present rules. It was this fine distinction that was to save Adams, for the prosecution in his case did not differentiate between those who were willing to apply the penalty, even though they objected to it, and those who would be unwilling to apply it.

The practice of jury seeding is, however, in itself problematic, for it has been shown that jurors who favour the death penalty are also less likely to be skeptical of the prosecution case, and more likely to find the accused guilty than are those who do not favour the penalty. People who are accused of capital murder, and whose juries have been seeded in the usual way, have a greater difficulty in convincing the jury of their innocence than do the accused in non-capital cases, where more liberal-minded jurors, less disposed to accept the voice of authority, are more likely to be present.

(see On the Fairness of Death-Penalty Jurors: A Comparison of Bayesian Models with Different Levels of Hierarchy and Various Missing-Data Mechanisms, by Elizabeth A. Stasny, Joseph B. Kadane, Kathleen S. Fritsch, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 93, No. 442 (Jun., 1998), pp. 464- 477

David Harris drove the car that he had stolen from Vidor to Dallas, and then returned there after the murder. When Randall Adams’s lawyers went to the town, to find out more about David Harris, they mostly drew a blank. Vidor, a small town where everyone knew everyone else, had decided to protect their own. Dennis White says that Vidor was a centre of KKK activity, and that the locals were under the impression that James Wood was black. (Wood was, in fact, a Cherokee Indian).

Vidor has a population of some 11,000, most of whom, says Dave Anderson, a photographer whose book Rough Beauty  is set there, are extremely poor. In the recent past, it was indeed a centre of KKK activity, and it was one of the many small southern towns that actively discouraged black people from settling. Such places were known as ‘Sundown towns’, as many of them would have signs telling all non-whites to be gone by the time the sun set. Today, it is still largely a white town.

Vidor is a town where most of the people hunt, and own guns. David Harris will have grown up knowing how to use them, and he also knew how to take care of them: Sam Kittrell recounts how the boy had wrapped the murder weapon up so well that it survived being sunk in water for a fortnight without suffering any damage.

Although there is much poverty in Vidor, and despite its racist past, there is comparatively little violence there. Theft is somewhat above the national average, which is probably due to the fact that many people are living on or below the breadline. But David Harris cannot be seen as a natural product of his surroundings. Many people in Vidor know how to use guns, but they don’t shoot other people with them.

One of Randall Adams’s lawyers gives the clearest account of the film’s central thesis. Randall Adams, says Dennis White, had no reason whatsoever to kill the policeman, while David Harris knew the car was stolen, was ‘on a crime spree’, and had “the heart filled with malice most apt to commit a murder”.

Almost everyone who has had contact with Harris, other than his various victims, agrees that he was a bright and charming young man. Even when they know the truth about him, they are liable to be taken in by his cheerful smile and his superficially open demeanour. He was, says one of the Dallas detectives, a friendly kid. Sam Kittrell, the police officer who knew him best, tells us that in his dealings with him, the boy was always polite, cordial, never disrespectful. He speaks about ‘little David’ with a certain tenderness, a tenderness which is shared by most of the people in his home town, for they close ranks to protect him when Dennis White comes down looking to convict him of the Wood murder.

These traits are typical of the psychopath or sociopath. According to the Psychopathology Check List, such a person is someone who highly narcissistic, and who has a thoroughly deviant lifestyle. He or she is superficially charming, has little deep attachment to others, feels no remorse for any harm he causes, tells lies, and blames others when things go wrong. The person is impulsive, always looking for excitement, and is unable to think ahead and make plans. But on first acquaintance, you are unlikely to be aware that you are in the presence of a dangerous individual. The psychologist, Hervey M. Cleckley, an influential specialist on the subject, put it :

“…More often than not, the typical psychopath will seem particularly agreeable and make a distinctly positive impression when he is first encountered. Alert and friendly in his attitude, he is easy to talk with and seems to have a good many genuine interests. There is nothing at all odd or queer about him, and in every respect he tends to embody the concept of a well-adjusted, happy person.

Such people are fairly rare, and are not always quite as dangerous as David Harris. It is sometimes claimed that they are well represented in Board Rooms and on Wall Street. Nor is it altogether clear that the diagnosis is fully accepted by the psychological profession: as Olivier Moyano points out, it has been absent from international systems of classification since the end of the 80s. It is not, he insists, a mental illness, but rather a complex disturbance of the personality.

American specialists tend to see the condition as innate: you are born a psychopath. European psychological traditions, on the other hand, see it is mainly environmental in origin, a product of family, culture and society. (In the USA, psychologists distinguish between the psychopath and the sociopath, the latter personality type being the result of childhood trauma). The Americans also see it as incurable, rooted as it is in the fundamental structure of the person. This has political and social consequences: if you believe that an evil-doer cannot be reformed in any way, then your duty to society is to remove him or her from that society, and ensure that no further harm may ensue. Lock them up, and throw away the key, or strap them to a gurney and inject them with a lethal drug.

It also leads to a particular way of reading the biography of the delinquent. For the psychologist who believes that personality is developed through interaction with family, friends, and the wider society, then a delinquent who has had a tumultuous childhood can be seen as, in some way, the victim of his upbringing. In the other hand, if the worm was in the bud from the start, then childhood difficulties can be explained as the desperate attempts of families and schools to deal with the atrocious behaviour of a child who was born bad.

How does Morris’s film approach David Harris? Several witnesses in The Thin Blue Line advance evidence for his psychopathy, although the term itself is never used. The most eloquent of these is the Vidor policeman, Sam Kittrell, who gives us several glimpses of Harris’s insouciance, such as when he amuses himself by holding up his handcuffs to passers-by and claiming that the police are planning on drowning him. He also tells us that David is a habitual liar, that he always manages to put the blame on someone else, even arguing that the victim of his final murder brought it upon himself.

But there are others: David has no conscience, one of his friends tells us, contrasting the boy’s attitude with his own feelings of guilt whenever he had done wrong. Randall Adams gives instances of David’s impetuous behaviour, waving his pistol around and shooting at a road sign. And once we have picked up on these clues, we can see the void behind the charm in David’s own appearances on the screen, his evasions, his self-justifications, and his attempt, even once he has come close to admitting that Adams was not in the car at the time of the crime, and had not pulled the trigger, to lay the blame on the older man’s shoulders.

Is there an explanation for Harris’s psychopathy? As I suggested in an earlier post, Morris, following up on a lead from Sam Kittrell, prompts Harris to recall the death of his elder brother when he himself was three years old. He feels that his father, who he sees as having been derelict in his oversight of the two boys, blamed him for the accident, and was hard with him from then on, adding a lack of affection to the trauma of sibling loss. But Morris is not overly interested in Harris’s back-story, and lets it drop there: we hear nothing from David’s parents, and his friends do not, on screen, make anything of their pal’s homelife.

We do know that David uses drugs; when he meets Adams at the age of sixteen, he is already no stranger to alcohol or marijuana. If he had been using these regularly from childhood, then this may well have affected his brain, preventing full development of adult conscience.

In the end, Harris is condemned to death for a second murder. We know that in order to condemn him to the capital sentence, the state had to prove that he was likely to kill again. For the state of Texas, David Harris was an incurable killer.