A commentator once suggested that We­ber was the only filmmaker who would dare tackle controversial subject matter and hope to make a commercially vi­able film. Released amidst the height of a national debate about the death pen­alty, The People vs. John Doe dramatizes the highly-publicized case of Charles Stielow, an uneducated farmhand facing execution for a murder many believed he did not commit. At the behest of the National Board of Censorship, all refer­ences to Stielow were eliminated and the title character’s name was changed to a pointed ‘John Doe’. Still, sure of its topical appeal, Universal rushed the film into theaters less than a week after Stielow’s death sentence was commuted, delaying the release of the studio’s highly-anticipated adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Anti-capital punishment activists seized upon the film to advocate their cause, speaking at screenings in New York and showing the film to legislators in Pennsylvania. Ac­cording to “Wid’s”, the film would “do more to make people think about capital punishment than all the pamphlets and speeches that could be prepared in a year’s time”. Only these three reels are known to survive.