What prompted a brilliant lawyer who was renowned for fighting for civil rights campaigners, the oppressed and disadvantaged to risk his reputation by representing some of America’s most notorious criminals?
Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler set out to answer that question in this documentary on their father. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe is a fascinating, revealing and intensely personal portrait of a controversial man who was much admired in the late 1960s and 1970s, but widely reviled in the latter part of his career.
The blood ties did not blind the producers/directors to their father’s foibles and faults, including a giant ego and constant need to be feted. They dutifully record his brave, crusading work for causes such as the Chicago Seven, who were accused of conspiracy and inciting to riot during the 1968 Democratic party convention; the inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York who seized the prison in 1971 to demand better living conditions and were slaughtered by state troopers; and the Native Americans who occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to force the US government to honour a long-standing treaty in 1973.
But public adulation turned to disgust in 1986 after he defended Larry Davis, a Bronx drug dealer accused of shooting six police officers. Davis got off but Kunstler’s daughters didn’t celebrate. 'Dad told us that Davis was a hero," says Emily, the doco’s narrator, "but what was heroic about shooting six cops?"
Kunstler drew further opprobrium in 1991 after his client, the Egyptian-born terrorist El Sayyid Nosair, was acquitted of the murder of militant Rabbi Meir Kahane. 'I decided I was never going to be like my father," Emily recalls.
So what caused this once highly-principled, visionary attorney to take on highly questionable cases? After he represented a cat accused of crimes against humanity at a mock televised trial, his daughters theorised that he had lost his mind.
That’s a big call for any filmmaker, especially when the subject is their father, who died in 1995.
DVD extras include numerous additional scenes.
