Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Last Defense’ On ABC, A True Crime Docuseries About Two Death Row Cases

ABC definitely wants to be in the Viola Davis business, which makes sense given that she rakes in awards like the rest of us rake leaves. She knows this, which is why she was able to get The Last Defense, about two death row cases that aren’t cut and dried, on the air. Can this docuseries stand with the best of the genre?

THE LAST DEFENSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of the courthouse in Kerrville, Texas, on February 4, 1997. News trucks are parked outside, waiting for the sentence for Darlie Routier, who was convicted of murdering her 5-year-old son Damon, who was stabbed to death along with his 6-year-old brother Devon. Darlie Routier was severely injured in the attack. We see flashes of headlines as a reporter discusses the case, where Routier steadfastly denies he stabbed her boys to death. When the sentence comes down, a reporter dashes through the halls, yelling “She’s dead!” to indicate Routier got the death penalty.

The Gist: The Last Defense is a 7-part docuseries that takes a deep dive into two notorious death row cases: Routier in the first four episodes, and Julius Jones in the next three. The first episode of the Routier arc sets up her case, via archive news footage, some artful reenactments and current-day interviews with Routier’s now ex-husband Darin, mother, sister, members of her appellate defense team, the Kerr County prosecutors, and more.

Twenty-one years after her conviction, Routier is still on death row, and there are real doubts as to her guilt and how the police in Rowlett, a suburb of Dallas, rushed to arrest her in the wake of the Susan Smith case in 1994.

By all accounts, Darlie Routier was a doting mother and a popular woman in the circles that she and Darin socialized in. By any indication, the Routiers were a close-knit family. But that was shattered on June 6, 1996, when an attacker stabbed Damon and Devon to death and severely injured Darlie (Darin was sleeping upstairs with their 8-month-old son Drake; both were unharmed). Crime scene footage is shown with a cut-open screen and blood everywhere. She claims a white intruder wearing dark clothes wielded a white-handled butcher knife, and she chased him out of the house.

But her account had inconsistencies, and the Rowlett police, the crime scene investigator they brought in for the case, and the prosecutors are convinced she did it, stabbing herself to make it look like an attack. Darin knows that’s not the case, and the attorneys and investigators brought in for the appeals process think the cops and prosecutors have overlooked key evidence for all of these years.

Our Take: The subject matter of The Last Defense, produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tennon is a noble one, as Davis’ voiceover during the show’s opening credits indicate: there are thousands of inmates on death row, and not all of them should be there. The series endeavors to examine the holes in the justice system that can lead to the wrongly convicted ending up in prison for life, sitting on death row, or even worse — executed for a crime they didn’t commit.

The show’s tack seems to be pretty straightforward in the first episode: give the facts of how the Routier case unfolded while giving both sides a chance to speak. It also means that it’s pretty slow-moving, meticulously reminding the audience of a case that played out in the national media two decades ago. The other three parts are going to be about the trial, an in-depth profile of Routier, and about the appeals process that has kept her alive all this time (the Jones arc will have the same arc, except for the in-depth profile). Things may pick up in the coming episodes, but there didn’t seem to be much need to review the case in such detail.

Parting Shot: Weeks after arresting and locking up Routier, a sock with the blood of the two boys is found in an alley 75 yards away from the house. How did it get there? And why didn’t the Rowlett police re-open the investigation after it was found?

Most Manipulative Element: The reenactments, while just showing things like a bloody hand as Routier is wheeled to surgery and not trying to recreate parts of the case, are still cheesy and not needed to keep viewers interested.

Our Call: SKIP IT. There are more compelling docuseries on streaming and cable right now, and you can likely get up to speed about the Routier and Jones cases by looking at their Wikipedia pages.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch The Last Defense on ABC