Actor-Turned-Lawyer’s Screenplay Among Silver Gavel Winners
A 30-minute screenplay that imagines the deliberations of three military judges deciding the fate of a Guantanamo Bay detainee is one of the winners of the 2009 Silver Gavel Awards sponsored by the American Bar Association.
The screenplay, The Response, was written by actor-turned-lawyer Sig Libowitz, who played a Jewish man with mob ties on The Sopranos and a public defender on Law & Order before he attended the University of Maryland Law School. The film is funded through the law school’s Linking Law & the Arts Program, with assistance from the law firm Venable.
Libowitz tells the ABA Journal he is “incredibly thrilled” by the award. The film has been accepted into seven Academy Award-qualifying film festivals and is being considered by television distributors.
The Response won in the drama and literature category. Other winners:
• Books—Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice in the War on Terror, A Public Defender’s Inside Account by Steven T. Wax. Honorable mention went to The Origins of Reasonable Doubt by James Q. Whitman.
• Commentary—“Open Discovery Columns” by Regina Brett, columnist, The Plain Dealer. Brett’s columns criticized discovery rules that kept defense lawyers in Cuyahoga County courts from seeing police reports, witness statements and other records. Judges voted to change the system after Plain Dealer readers sent in 10,000 signatures supporting open discovery.
• Documentaries—Writ Writer by Austin, Texas-based Passage Productions and Independent Television Service with Latino Public Broadcasting. It tells the story of a jailhouse lawyer who challenged the constitutionality of prison conditions in Texas in the 1960s.
• Newspapers— “Broken Families, Broken Courts,” a series of stories investigating juvenile dependency courts by the San Jose Mercury News.
• In the Radio category, an honorable mention went to American Purgatory: Political Asylum in the Age of Terrorism.
ABA President H. Thomas Wells Jr. will present the awards at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on July 1. Jeffrey Toobin, staff writer for The New Yorker, is the featured speaker.
Updated on May 7 to include comments from Libowitz.
