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Storyville Global: Innocent On Death Row

14/03/2015 GMT

Innocent On Death Row

BBC World News - Storyville Global, Innocent On Death Row

Documentary about a Filipino man accused of raping and killing two sisters.

Documentary about the struggle to convict or free a Filipino man accused of raping and killing two sisters, set against a backdrop of corrupt public officials and media hysteria.

The Philippines, 1997. As a tropical storm beats down on the Philippine island of Cebu, two sisters leave work and never make it home. That same night, hundreds of miles away in Manila on a different island, Paco Larranaga, 19, is at a party, surrounded by dozens of reliable witnesses. The missing women, Marijoy, 21,and Jacqueline Chiong, 23, are Chinese-Filipinos. Paco, accused of their rapes and murders, is a Spanish mestizo who belongs to a political clan that includes a former president. Beefy and tough, with a past of petty offenses, he neatly fits the role of privileged thug - and that is how he is cast by a frenzied media circus that cheers his eventual sentence to death by lethal injection. Reflecting schisms of race, class, and political power at the core of the Philippines' tumultuous democracy, clashing families, institutions, and individuals face off to convict or free Paco. Their irreconcilable versions of reality and justice play out in a case that ends a country's use of capital punishment, yet fails to free an innocent man.

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