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What would have become of Charu and Abed had they met after the fall of the Twin Towers? Alison Maclean & Tobias Perse’s documentary Persons of Interest (2003; January 28 at 6 p.m. and January 29 at 9 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre) offers a clue. Filmed at a meeting of Arab-American families who have suffered because of the Justice Department’s post–September 11 crackdown, it presents damning testimony. Innocent people tossed into jail for months and years without charges. Families broken up. Lives ruined. Some victims maintain their faith in America; others say that this is the kind of tyranny they came to America to escape. So much for the land of the free.

Rivaling suspected terrorists as personae non gratae are juvenile offenders. Surely the country grows safer when underage offenders are tried, convicted, and sentenced as adults for major felonies? Not only is that untrue, argues documentarian Leslie Neale in Juvies (2004; January 29 at 5 and 7 p.m., January 30 at 8 p.m., and February 1 at 9 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with filmmakers Leslie Neale and Traci Odom present at the January 29 and 30 screenings), but this get-tough system has resulted in grotesque injustices. With voiceover narration from former juvie Mark Wahlberg, the film intercuts the fates of a handful of youths undergoing trial and sentencing with observations from experts and officials. Sixteen-year-old Duc, for example, was driving a car when a passenger in it shot at someone. No one was hurt, yet with no prior record and no gang ties, Duc got 35 years hard time. His case is typical. "It is a slow genocide," one spokesman concludes.

That remark could apply equally to the situation described in Katy Chevigny & Kirsten Johnson’s documentary Deadline (2003; January 30 at 12:30 and 6 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre). Back in 2002, outgoing Illinois governor George Ryan, a conservative Republican, shocked the country by ordering an investigation into his state’s capital punishment system. The inequities and errors uncovered moved him to order a blanket commutation of all death-row cases to life imprisonment. The filmmakers chronicle the anguish and the soul searching behind Ryan’s decision, and they give equal time to the harrowing testimony of victims’ families and the tales of narrow escapes and ruined lives of those wrongly sentenced to death. They put this raw material in the context of the recent history of capital punishment and commentary mostly by anti-death-penalty spokespersons. The conclusion? The death penalty kills innocent people, demoralizes the justice system, and provides no deterrent. "Let’s offer victims something other than revenge," says Ryan as he makes the final commutation official. Fat chance that other pols might follow in his footsteps. Ryan was, after all, leaving office the same day. And as Deadline reminds us, in 1992, Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Bill Clinton executed a retarded man so as not to appear soft on crime.

After watching all these movies about corruption and injustice in our own system, we might hope to be reminded that other countries are much worse off. Instead, Peruvian director Francisco J. Lombardi’s Ojos que no ven/What the Eye Doesn’t See (2003; January 29 at 3 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts and February 3 at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre) offers a nightmarish scenario of what America might yet become. In the 1990s, President Alberto Fujimori ran a rotten regime of bribing, extortion, and murder. When a treasure trove of incriminating videos comes to light, the regime gets desperate. The effect on a disparate group of people ranging from a blood-stained colonel to the flutist granddaughter of a bed-ridden old activist provides the filmmaker with a somewhat contrived but always fascinating framework within which to examine the pathology of power. What does the eye not see? For one, the videos and the news reports fail to show the pathetic sexual and romantic motives underlying both the basest and the noblest deeds.

David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999; January 31 at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre), the only significant movie made about the Gulf War, is reprised here for a special showing. What underlies power at first seems to be mere greed and calculation, with George Clooney’s band of Desert Storm mavericks going after Kuwaiti gold. But their rapacity melts before the plight of the hapless refugees whose lives end up in their hands.

The opposite seems to be the case in Russell’s short documentary "Soldiers Pay" (2004), which screens after Three Kings. Commissioned for inclusion on the fifth-anniversary DVD release of Kings, it was aborted for being too "political." Russell interviews several veterans of the latest Iraq War, Kurdish-Iraqi actors from his earlier film, and expert military and political commentators. All agree, whether they were in favor of the war or not, that the aftermath has been botched. No news flash there, but what makes Soldiers Pay fascinating is the story of a handful of mavericks, much like those in Three Kings, who try to make off with a couple of a million from Saddam’s war chest. The alleged ringleader says he was told that the money would go to the "reconstruction of Iraq." In other words, Russell suggests, to Dick Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton: Dick may be dedicated to Homeland Security and the rebuilding of Iraq, but not at the expense of the security of his own little nest egg.