Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story is a documentary film directed by Daniel H. Birman. Cyntoia Denise Brown, 16, was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2004 for the murder of Johnny Michael Allen, a 43-year-old man who had picked her up for sex. Cyntoia’s destiny looked determined when she was convicted as an adult and condemned to life in prison. The video depicts the complexities of a youngster who was born into a household that had three generations of abuse towards women. Governor Bill Haslam approved her mercy plea after almost ten years of legal battles. He did so as a result of the state’s sluggish transition toward legislative reform in juvenile sentencing legislation.
This documentary is directly related to criminology’s social structure theory. According to this view, crime stems from economic and other structural issues in society, as well as poverty and other local issues, such as violence against women (Burke, 2017). In this instance, Cyntoia, a child from a low-income home, was going to be sexually abused when she shot and murdered Allen. Her crime was led by the notion of social change, which deals with the factors that affect the social structure and organization of society since she was a product of three generations of violence against women. As such, what seemed to be just another graphic Netflix true-crime investigation turned out to be a far more moving illustration of the harm caused by repeated sexual assault, and as revenge, social structure theory takes precedence.
Work Cited
Burke, R. H. (2017). An introduction to Criminological theory (4th ed.). Routledge.