Films and criminal justice

SIGNIFICANCE: Films with criminal justice themes system can convey important ideas and information about the criminal justice system to the public; at the same time, however, they also frequently distort the realities of criminal justice in the United States.

Virtually as long as artists have attempted to depict life, they have found fruitful subjects in accounts of those accused of crimes and the law that undertakes to apprehend, try, and punish them. Modern filmmakers follow in a tradition at least as old as Antigone, a fifth century CE play by the Greek writer Sophocles. In that play, a woman is accused of defying the king’s law to honor her dead brother. One need only scan the list of Academy Award-winning films to see the enduring presence of criminal law as a cinematic theme, from Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937) to Unforgiven (1992), Chicago (2002), and The Departed (2006). The cinema’s fascination with criminal law extends even into the future, as witnessed by films such as RoboCop (1987), Demolition Man (1993), Judge Dredd (1995), Minority Report (2002), and Crimes of the Future (2022) that speculate about forms that criminal justice system may take in the future.

By its very nature, criminal law is a complex technical subject. Accordingly, films that are typically only ninety minutes to two hours in length are poorly positioned to capture the details of criminal justice. In real life, the kinds of cases that find fictional counterparts in films typically consume weeks or months in their investigation and prosecution. Accordingly, it is the rare film that does not distort the real processes of criminal law in one way or another. Nevertheless, films about the criminal justice system can—in broad strokes at least—illuminate the law. They can fairly indict the law and, sometimes, they can honor it. So long as viewers understand the inherent limitations in simple treatments of what is often quite complex and understand the general bias of filmmakers for the sensational, then those who watch films can often learn something useful about the real-life criminal justice system.

The Routines and Tedium of Criminal Justice

The eminent jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once observed that the "life of the law has not been logic, but experience." He might also have said that the "life of the law has not been logic, but long hours." Monotony, tedium, and routine characterize the lives of those involved with the criminal justice system. In contrast to film cops, real-life police spend far more time interviewing witnesses, cultivating and consulting informants, and running searches in computer databases than they do engaging in dramatic car chases and desperate gun battles. Indeed, they spend more time writing reports than they do in stark rooms with one-way mirrors interviewing witnesses.

In contrast to their film counterparts, real-life courtroom attorneys seldom wring tearful confessions out of lying witnesses—or not-so-tearful confessions, such as one that Jack Nicholson makes to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men (1992). Instead, they spend most of their time out of court, methodically preparing cases. In fact, the vast majority of criminal cases never go to court. Prosecutors and defense attorneys engage in plea bargaining, which settles most criminal charges short of trials. When attorneys do appear in court, they are tamer than films suggest. Whereas film lawyers spend much of their courtroom time swaggering about, most real courts require lawyers to examine witnesses either while seated behind tables or while standing behind lecterns. Tedium makes for bad cinema, however, and filmmakers accordingly present more glamorous, or at least more exciting, versions of the criminal process.

This is not to say, however, that the law even at its most mundane is not interesting. Television viewers who followed the coverage of the 1995 criminal trial of O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, for example, received lessons in the monotony of real-life courtroom practice but nevertheless found the trial often fascinating. With its celebrity defendant and celebrity defense attorneys, the Simpson trial was precisely the kind of sensational murder case that dominates film law. It is not, however, the kind of trial that dominates the everyday life of the criminal justice system. In real life, drugs, thefts, and more mundane versions of domestic violence occupy a far more prominent place than do former football players and bloody gloves.

Attorneys with Guilty Clients

Nowhere does film law stray farther from reality than when it suggests that the abilities of criminal defense attorneys to do their jobs hinges on their confidence in the innocence of their clients. One often gains the impression from watching films about criminal justice that defense lawyers spend most of their time representing innocents falsely accused of crimes. Moreover, one might infer that it is improper for lawyers to represent clients whom they know—or strongly believe—to be guilty. Film lawyers who find themselves representing guilty defendants sometimes behave dramatically. In . . . And Justice for All (1979), for example, the lawyer whom Al Pacino portrays discovers that the judge whom he is defending is guilty of rape and feels compelled to announce that fact to the jury during his opening statement. In Guilty as Sin (1993), the lawyer played by Rebecca De Mornay plants evidence to incriminate her client after she discovers that he is guilty of murdering his wife. In Criminal Law (1988) the lawyer played by Gary Oldman continues to represent a guilty client (Kevin Bacon) after suspecting that his client is a serial killer, so that he can stop him from committing more murders.

The dilemmas that these film lawyers experience in discovering their clients’ guilt are completely unrealistic. Criminal defense lawyers are ethically required to represent their clients diligently, without regard to their guilt or innocence. Knowing that a client is guilty does nothing to diminish this obligation of diligent representation. As the lawyer in Before and After (1996) explains to the parents of a son accused of murder, many clients have been guilty of one thing or another since they were young, but they still deserve a good defense.

A lawyer who betrays a guilty client in real life is not likely to be allowed to remain a lawyer for long. In . . . And Justice for All, Pacino realistically faces the threat of disbarment for secretly informing the police that one of his clients has fantasized about committing a certain crime that is being perpetrated by an unknown assailant. However, the same film fails to address the possibility of Pacino’s disbarment for denouncing his murder-case client in his opening statement.

A more realistic message permeates Reversal of Fortune (1990), a film based on a book written by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. With the assistance of some of his law school students Dershowitz represented Claus von Bulow on appeal after Bulow was convicted of murdering his wife. For Dershowitz, it did not matter whether Bulow was innocent or guilty; he regarded the man as entitled to the best representation that he could afford (and Bulow could afford to pay for a prominent Harvard Law School professor). Similarly, in Primal Fear (1996), Richard Gere plays a criminal lawyer who rushes to represent a young client accused of murdering an archbishop, not because he believes the young man is innocent, but because he is eager to collect the publicity that the case promises to provide. Only gradually does he come to believe that his client is innocent.

In most American jurisdictions, lawyers who know that their clients are guilty may find themselves restrained in ways not experienced by lawyers without that knowledge. For example, most states prohibit lawyers from offering evidence they know is false during trials. Accordingly, if lawyers know their clients have committed certain crimes, they cannot sit silently and allow their clients to testify the contrary in court. Nevertheless, the lawyers remain free—and are, in fact, absolutely obligated—to challenge vigorously the prosecution’s evidence and otherwise represent their clients zealously.

Technicalities and Criminal Justice

A common film critique of law is to suggest the injustice of a system that lets guilty criminal defendants escape punishment on the basis of so-called technicalities. One such technicality, known as the exclusionary rule, is a prominent feature of modern criminal justice proceedings. This rule generally requires that evidence unlawfully obtained cannot be used against criminal defendants in court. For instance, under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects citizens against unreasonable search and seizure, if police illegally enter a home and discover therein evidence of a crime, the evidence they find is generally not admissible in court. The exclusionary rule is justified by the necessity of deterring the police from engaging in illegal behavior. The rule is based on the notion that the only effective way to deter police from engaging in unconstitutional behavior is to make them understand that the fruits of their illegal conduct cannot be used to convict criminals.

Films sometimes treat the exclusionary rule as a merely arbitrary technicality that allows criminals to go free. Not uncommonly, the apparent unreasonableness of this rule inspires vigilante justice of one sort or another. A prominent example is the fictional San Francisco detective "Dirty Harry" Callahan (Clint Eastwood), who always finds ways to have bullets track down criminals who are unleashed on society by the exclusionary rule. Similarly, in The Star Chamber (1983) renegade judges hire killers to execute the criminals that they have had to release by virtue of the exclusionary rule or other related constitutional doctrines. Films seldom dramatize the real justification for the exclusionary rule: to deter police misconduct.

Law-Enforcement Mayhem

Filmmakers—at least those of the action-film variety—love to blow things up. When police or other law-enforcement personnel are involved in action films, they can usually be counted on to cause, or at least contribute to, a variety of explosions, fiery collisions, and other forms of mayhem. Sergeant Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) of the Lethal Weapon series, for example, pulls down a house in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) and sets off a bomb that destroys an office building and burns down a construction site in Lethal Weapon 3 (1992). In A Day to Die (2022), a parole officer, Connor Connolly, becomes involved with a drug kingpin, Tyrone Pettis, after he kills one of the kingpin's enforcers. Pettis kidnaps Connolly's pregnant wife to get Connolly to pull several drug heists. Bruce Willis plays the corrupt police chief, Alson. The violent flick features many explosions caused by rocket launchers and grenades.

Although law-enforcement superiors in films sometimes express dismay at the property destruction accomplished by their officers, films tend to convey an all-in-a-day’s-work attitude toward police mayhem.

In real life, law-enforcement officers do not have a blank check to destroy things (or injure people) in pursuit of their official duties. Legal doctrines on this issue are complicated and vary from state to state. Nevertheless, police departments and other law-enforcement agencies are often found liable for damages that occur in connection with their work.

In principle, governments at all levels—federal, state, and municipal—possess sovereign immunity, which means that they cannot generally be sued for damages unless they consent to the suits. In practice, however, governments at every level must consent to such suits—at least under certain defined circumstances—by statute. For example, the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946 authorizes suits against the federal government when its agents or officials act negligently. Similar laws exist for state and local governments. Accordingly, law-enforcement officers who act negligently may generally be sued by citizens injured as a result of their negligence or recklessness.

One of the most famous chase scenes in film history occurs in The French Connection (1971), in which actor Gene Hackman plays the maniacal police detective Popeye Doyle. Midway through the film, Doyle commandeers a car from a civilian and then recklessly pursues a criminal fleeing in an out-of-control elevated train. The film’s skilled editing makes the ground-level car’s pursuit of the overhead train exceptionally exciting. Meanwhile, the chase scene itself shows Doyle hitting several other cars and narrowly missing several pedestrians, including a young woman pushing a baby buggy. In real life, if a New York police officer were actually to kill an innocent person in such a reckless chase, he or she could be named defendant—along with the city of New York and the New York Police Department—in wrongful death lawsuits.

Intimate Relationships

The criminal justice system aspires to an objectivity in which reason replaces emotion and law reigns in the place of passion. Objectivity, however, makes for dull films. Accordingly, one of the favorite plot devices of cinematic justice is to create sexual relationships among characters—between, for example, police officers and lawyers, detectives and suspects, and suspects and their attorneys. Basic Instinct (1992), for example, finds a police officer sexually involved not with one suspect, but with two, in a murder investigation. In Mea Culpa (2024), a criminal defense attorney becomes romantically involved with her client, an artist who is accused of murdering his girlfriend.

Cinema lawyers are also not immune from inappropriate sexual attractions. Typically, these involve lawyers who have sexual relationships with their clients, as in Physical Evidence (1989), starring Theresa Russell as a lawyer who represents a former cop, played by Burt Reynolds, who is accused of murder. In Jagged Edge (1985), Glenn Close plays a lawyer who gets involved with her client, played by Jeff Bridges. Occasionally, however, lawyers form attachments with other players in the criminal justice system, such as the highly unlikely romantic relationship that an attorney played by Cher forms with a member of the jury in her case, played by Dennis Quaid in Suspect (1987), or the attachment that Al Pacino forms with lawyer Christine Lahti, a member of the state bar ethics committee, in . . . And Justice for All.

As these summaries suggest, a willingness to step across established professional boundaries tends to be attributed more often to women than to men in films about the law. There are exceptions, such as Body of Evidence (1993), in which Willem Dafoe plays a lawyer who rushes to bed his sexually adventurous client (Madonna), who is accused of murdering her husband, and Body Heat (1981), in which a lawyer actually conspires with his client/lover to murder the latter’s husband. Nevertheless, films about the law seem especially prone to promoting stereotypical views of women, portraying them as emotionally more vulnerable and generally less competent than their male counterparts. Such stereotypes do not do justice to the many women who participate in the criminal justice system.

The frequency of sexual encounters involving police, lawyers, and others in criminal justice films is matched by the ambivalent attitude displayed toward such encounters by the law in real life. Police informants, for example, sometimes have sexual relationships with the targets of criminal investigations, but courts have generally been reluctant to punish these individuals, unless police deliberately set out to use sex to trap criminal targets.

Rules that govern the conduct of lawyers have generally refrained from containing explicit prohibitions against sexual relationships between lawyers and their clients. Nevertheless, when such relationships have been found to have affected attorneys’ representation of their clients adversely or otherwise to have harmed clients, courts and ethics committees have not hesitated to punish the lawyers involved. These results reflect the broader principle that lawyers may not represent clients when some competing interest—including sexual or other kinds of personal attachments—might undermine their ability to serve their clients diligently. For example, most states explicitly prohibit lawyers who are married to each another from serving on opposite sides of the same case. The famous pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as opposing prosecutor and defense attorney in a sensational murder case in Adam’s Rib (1949) would thus ordinarily be prohibited.

Maverick Justice

Ideally, the criminal justice system identifies and then punishes or rehabilitates those who fracture the social order. Films about criminal justice, however, regularly emphasize that either this system itself or the actors within it are themselves fractured and broken. When the justice system is broken, mavericks must act lawlessly to restore law.

Some mavericks do not choose this role but are assigned it by a system that is corrupt. Al Pacino, for example, plays an undercover cop in Serpico (1973) who is ostracized by his corrupt colleagues for testifying at a grand jury investigation about police extorting money from criminals. Though dramatized, the film was based on a true story. Equally common are fully fictional mavericks who believe that the law is too soft on criminals and take it on themselves to mete out meatier justice. Harry Callahan is a prominent example of this kind of maverick. Dirty Harry (1971) and its sequels—Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988)—followed in the wake of what has been called the "rights revolution" under the US Supreme Court leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Warren court expanded the rights accorded to defendants in the criminal process. The most famous example of this expansion occurred in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), decided only five years before Dirty Harry was released. That decision required that defendants be advised of their rights before being questioned by police. In the minds of Dirty Harry and the audiences who cheered him, however, constitutional developments such as Miranda distorted justice and impeded its pursuit.

Films are also prepared to remind the public of the dangers posed by lawless law. Thus, in The Star Chamber, judges tired of having to release criminals on technicalities choose to manufacture a shadow justice system, in which killers are contracted to kill other killers. As it happens, however, the system is not as badly broken as the vigilante judges imagine, and their lawless law turns out to be simply lawless after all. Sometimes one maverick must take on others, as Harry Callahan does in Magnum Force, the first sequel to Dirty Harry, when he confronts rogue cops who are dispensing their own brand of justice.

Maverick cops such as Harry Callahan are easier to portray than maverick lawyers. They wield the power of vigilante violence against criminals who manage to elude the power of the criminal justice system. Lawyers generally possess no power other than that which they derive through their professional competence as advocates within the justice system. At most, they can assume the role of maverick in more subtle ways than the maverick cop, by violating rules of the legal system as they remain planted firmly inside that system. A lawyer such as Al Pacino plays in . . . And Justice for All, who announces his client’s guilt in open court, is a maverick, to be sure, but he ceases be a lawyer. In fact, as Pacino’s character sits on the courthouse steps following the mistrial inevitably granted after his outburst, he should be planning a new career, for he will surely be disbarred. By contrast, a rogue cop such as Harry Callahan can continue to do good business in film sequels.

Innocents at the Mercy of Law

A recurring theme in films about criminal law is the possibility that innocent men and women may find themselves the victims of the criminal process. In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956), for example, a musician played by Henry Fonda finds himself arrested for a crime he did not commit and only narrowly escapes going to jail, when the real criminal, who looks very much like him, is finally caught. The Wrong Man is harrowing, precisely because the process that mistakenly identifies Fonda otherwise proceeds competently and in an orderly way through every step.

Although the criminal justice system accords to those accused of crimes the presumption of innocence, this presumption does not always prevent innocents from being wrongly convicted. It does not even mean, technically, that participants in the justice system suspend belief in the likelihood that individuals charged with having committed crimes actually committed them. Instead, the presumption of innocence means that the criminal justice system requires the state to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and that, without such proof, a criminal defendant must be acquitted.

Films can be useful in prompting viewers to consider whether particular punishments are justified in the light of the reality that at least some innocents will inevitably be called upon to experience them. In The Shawshank Redemption (1994), for instance, the brutality of prison life takes on a sharper focus when this brutality is borne by an innocent man, wrongly convicted of murdering his adulterous wife and her lover. In films such as The Life of David Gale (2003) and True Crime (1999), the possibility that innocent people may be executed is used to indict capital punishment.

Heroic Lawyers (and Clients)

At the conclusion of the trial of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Atticus Finch, famously played by Gregory Peck, silently gathers his things and prepares to leave the courtroom after the jury finds his client guilty. The black citizens of Macon, Alabama, who have watched the trial from the gallery, remain in the courtroom as Finch prepares to leave. One black gentleman finally prods Atticus’s daughter, who has been watching from the gallery, to get up, saying, "Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’." That line of film dialogue sent an entire generation of students to law school. It suggested that the law was a profession that offered possibilities for heroism and honor, even if those qualities are accompanied by occasional defeats, such as the courtroom defeat Atticus Finch suffers.

Although more recent films continue to offer specimens of heroism among lawyers, modern films are less likely to present narratives in which heroic white lawyers represent powerless black defendants. The complexities of race relations in the United States have led many films to present alternatives to the heroic lawyer story line. Intruder in the Dust (1949), for example, based on the novel of the same title by William Faulkner, presents a comparable legal setting—an African American man wrongly accused of a crime (killing a white man) who is defended by a white attorney. In Intruder in the Dust, however, the attorney assumes that his client is guilty and fails to represent him vigorously. Lucas Beauchamp, the accused murderer, must persuade a teenage boy—the lawyer’s nephew Chick—to uncover the evidence that will exonerate him. The resulting expedition, in which an elderly secretary and a young black friend join Chick, involves digging up a grave.

In A Time to Kill (1996) a Black man kills the men who raped his daughter as they are on their way to a courtroom to be arraigned. In this film, the father, however, is anything but a powerless victim; he is a determined and forceful man who not only avenges his daughter’s brutal rape but also participates actively in the preparation and presentation of his own subsequent defense. Similarly, in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), based upon the real-life retrial of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Alex Baldwin plays the part of assistant district attorney Bobbie DeLaughter, the lawyer who brings Beckwith to trial long after his initial trial resulted in a hung jury. Although Baldwin plays a heroic character, the true hero of the film is Myrlie Evers, Medgar’s wife, played by Whoopi Goldberg, who perseveres in a decades-long battle to see her husband’s killer brought to justice.

The 2019 biographical drama, Just Mercy, stars Michael B. Jordan as real-life attorney Bryan Stevenson , who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1989. In the film, Stevenson travels to Alabama, where he takes up the case of Walter McMillian, a Black man on death row whose conviction was based on questionable testimony. As Stevenson fights to get McMillian’s sentence overturned, he faces a host of obstacles put in place by a racist justice system.

Immoral Lawyers

In a culture in which jokes about the widely perceived untrustworthiness of lawyers are popular ("How can you tell if a lawyer is lying?" "Their lips are moving."), films about criminal justice sometimes pose serious questions about the ethics of attorneys. The antilawyer spirit animating lawyer jokes often finds a comfortable ally in films that treat attorneys as having sold their souls, whether literally—as in the case of the young lawyer played by Keanu Reeves who finds himself an apprentice to Satan (Al Pacino) in The Devil’s Advocate (1997)—or more figuratively, as depicted with the lawyer (Tom Cruise) hired by a Memphis law firm whose principal client is the mob in The Firm (1993). More often, however, films about the law dramatize less remarkable forms of immoral conduct by lawyers.

Greed and dereliction are sins sometimes laid at the doors of attorneys in films about the justice system. James Woods, for example, plays a burned-out civil rights lawyer who now spends his days counting the money he gets from drug dealers in True Believer (1989). In . . . And Justice for All, a lawyer shows up late for a court hearing. Then he pays so little attention to the matter he is handling that his client is sentenced to jail and commits suicide. In real life, common ethical complaints lodged against lawyers include failure to attend adequately to the affairs of their clients and misappropriation of their clients’ funds.

Prisons and Executions

Since the era of silent film prison life has been a recurring film subject. Prison films such as The Hurricane (1999), about Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, frequently claim to replicate—or at least be based on—real events. More often, however, prison films are simply vehicles for stock themes and plots as divorced from real typical prison life as cinema courtroom scenes are divorced from real-life trials. Real prison life is more about boredom and unpleasant companions than it is about escapes, such as those in Mrs. Soffel (1984) or Escape from Alcatraz (1979) (though the latter is loosely based on a real escape), or riots, as in The Last Castle (2001). Sometimes, however, claims to tell a true story are well founded. Brubaker (1980), for example, credibly dramatizes the efforts of Arkansas prison warden Tom Merton to reform prison life in his state.

A subspecies of prison film—the execution film—frequently strives for a different kind of connection with reality, an impact on the institution of the death penalty as carried out in the United States. Not uncommonly, these films build cases against the death penalty by dramatizing executions, or near-executions, of defendants innocent of the crimes for which they are sentenced to die. The Life of David Gale (2003) and Clint Eastwood’s True Crime (1999) are examples of this kind of execution film. The participants in the death-penalty debate understand that the innocent are sometimes executed, but these films help inform this debate by insisting that the innocent are not merely unnamed statistics but real individuals (or fictional characters made to stand in for real individuals).

Sometimes, though, filmmakers attempt to dramatize issues arising from the death-penalty debate without the use of innocent prisoners. Sharon Stone plays a vicious murderer whose imminent execution is the subject of Last Dance (1996). Although the character played by Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking (1995) claims not to have pulled the trigger in a murder, he is nevertheless a nasty piece of work. Dead Man Walking in particular calls attention to an important reality in the death-penalty debate when it notes that there are no rich defendants on death row. In Shelter in Solitude (2023) Val, a female prison guard, befriends Jackson, a man on death row with only ten days to live. As their friendship deepens, Jackson tells Val about his life and his crime--killing his daughter's rapist. With the clock ticking, Val works to reunite him with his daugther before he is executed.

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