“Deadline,” a documentary film co-produced by Mount View High School graduate Dallas Brennan of Monroe, will air at 8 tonight in a special two-hour edition of NBC’s “Dateline.” The film tracks former Illinois Gov. George Ryan as he grapples with flaws uncovered in his state’s criminal justice system and whether to issue pardons to inmates on death row. Thirteen inmates awaiting execution on death row were discovered to be innocent in the months leading up to Ryan’s eventual decision.

“Deadline” is the sixth documentary feature produced by the New York-based, women-owned Big Mouth Productions. The film was selected for the documentary competition at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.

Brennan, 31, co-produced the film with director Katy Chevigny. Chevigny’s co-director on the project was Kirsten Johnson.

A graduate of Swarthmore College and a Fulbright scholar, Brennan has produced a number of films since joining Big Mouth Productions. Among them are the feature-length documentaries “Journey to the West: Chinese Medicine Today,” which is about traditional Chinese medicine in China and the United States, and “Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America.” She also worked in multiple capacities on the PBS documentary “Our House” and the 10-hour series “An American Love Story.”

The film follows the clemency hearings that Gov. Ryan opened in late 2002 for all 167 of the inmates on Illinois’ death row. “Deadline” captures the experience of innocent death row inmates who recount the horror of living under the shadow of execution.

At first glance, Ryan is an unlikely protagonist. For 20 years, he was a tough-on-crime, pro-death-penalty Republican. However, shortly after he became governor, a group of undergraduate journalism students at Northwestern University discovered important evidence that proved a man on death row was wrongly convicted. Further investigations revealed another dozen men who were wrongly convicted, leading Ryan to determine that clemency hearings were needed.

During the hearings, families stand off against each other in a tense, emotionally charged fight over life and death. For instance, one family demands that the ultimate punishment against the convicted killer of their loved one be kept intact, while the mother of the convicted man pleads for mercy for her son’s life.

“Deadline” puts the Illinois clemency hearings into perspective by constructing a provocative narrative of landmark capital punishment decisions in the United States. The history of those decisions is told through interviews with the nation’s leading capital punishment experts, a prison warden who oversaw executions, former and current death

row inmates and, finally, Gov. Ryan, who agreed to a rare one-on-one interview with the filmmakers.

In that interview, Ryan discusses the serious problems with the criminal justice system that he saw and could not ignore. Those revelations led him to grant blanket commutation to all 167 death row inmates in Illinois and sentencing them to life without parole.

In his speech announcing the commutation, Ryan quoted a 1994 remark by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who was once a supporter of the death penalty but opposed it in the twilight of his career.

“I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death,” quoted Ryan in the film.

Walter Griffin can be reached at 338-9546 and bdnbfst@earthlink.com.