Time Simply Passes

Time Simply Passes is a feature-length documentary film about James Joseph Richardson, an African-American orange picker in rural Florida who was wrongfully convicted of poisoning his seven children to death in 1967. He was given the death sentence, and spent 21 years in prison until he was released in 1989 when his conviction was overturned due to miraculous circumstances. Upon his release, he was a national celebrity, and he was used as an example of a broken system made right. Once the fanfare subsided, he was left penniless and alone in an unfamiliar world, and given no help from the State that robbed him of the majority of his life while the true killer of his children stayed free. For the past 26 years, he's been trying again and again to receive recompense from the State of Florida. This is his story. It's a film about race, about Florida, about the evolution of small-town justice, about forgotten moments in history, about corrupt police and politicians, and an evaluation of the concept of restorative compensatory justice. The film relies heavily on archival footage, photographs, and documents, and attempts to piece all the elements together to accurately and completely tell a story 50 years in the making.