Justice: A Free Man Still Looks Over His Shoulder in Mexico

A Free Man Still Looks Over His Shoulder in Mexico - NYTimes.com: "MEXICO CITY

EVER since he was exonerated for a murder he did not commit and was released from prison, José Antonio Zúñiga has tried to disappear.

He sold his car, so nobody could track his address. He works at home fixing computers, but only for friends. He has no bank account. “It sounds absurd, but I don’t exist,” he said.

Absurd, indeed, because in the past couple of weeks, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have watched Mr. Zúñiga’s ordeal unfold on movie screens, turning him into a reluctant symbol of the failings of Mexico’s legal system.

As the star of a documentary, “Presumed Guilty,” that has become a hit here, Mr. Zúñiga, 31, tells much of his own story as the camera tracks his time in prison and records the retrial that ultimately led to his release.

The film puts Mexico’s secretive courts on full display for the first time. With the collaboration of the court’s grimacing judge and its simpering prosecutor, its threatening police officers and its stilted procedures, the criminal justice system seems to manufacture Mr. Zúñiga’s guilt, even though the evidence points toward his innocence.

A free man for two and a half years, Mr. Zúñiga, or Toño to everybody who knows him, is fearful that somebody may take revenge for the film. ...

while the documentary “lends itself to heroes and villains,” the “real challenge is for people to understand that the villain is the system and the institutional design,” said Layda Negrete, one-half of the husband-and-wife team of lawyers who made the film. “To understand that we shouldn’t fire the judge, but change the whole structure in which the judges operate.”"