Guilty or innocent - does it matter?

We love courtroom dramas, witness the recent Golden Globe awards, yet truth and justice are rarely the point or moral of the tale.

Happy new year, and welcome to the first edition of What’s the Story? for 2024. I hope the lengthening days are brightening your lives.

Like most of us I guess, I watched several movies over the holidays and most of them were courtroom dramas. Ditto three new French films I have seen in recent months, The Sitting Duck (La Syndicaliste, 2022), The Goldman Case (Le Procès Goldman, 2023) and Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d’une chute, 2023), which has just won two Golden Globes. Inevitably that coincidence got me wondering why it is that court proceedings so fascinate us as readers, audience and writers.

Anyone who has ever sat through a court hearing will testify that the real thing is light on drama, heavy on legal precedent and tedium, unless you’re the one in the box. Yet the setting and its formalities have entertained us for centuries, from Aeschylus’ Eumenides (458 BCE), to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596-8) and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960). Not all are murder cases, although that is the most common of the crimes tried.

  Orestes is acquitted on the bizarre grounds that the father is the true parent to the child, the mother being a mere vessel for his seed. I doubt that argument would hold much sway these days. Athena also did a side deal with the avenging and displaced Eumenides which helped Orestes. The Merchant of Venice is beloved for its courtroom scene where Shylock, suing Antonio for breach of contract, is outsmarted by Portia who poses as a lawyer to help her husband’s friend. As in many other instances Shakespeare’s words here have entered our common speech, the notorious ‘pound of flesh’ being at issue, and the opening appeal for clemency by Portia/Balthazar oft-quoted:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

(Act IV: ii: ll.180-3)

Lee’s Atticus Finch, memorably played by Gregory Peck in the classic 1962 movie, remains a benchmark for defence lawyers. Courteous and kind, he trips up the real culprit with a simple sleight of hand. By contrast, Dickens’ eternal probate case Jarndyce -v- Jarndyce from Bleak House (1852-3) is a byword for the frustratingly slow pace of legal proceedings.

 Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Trial by Jury (1875) features a woman suing for breach of (marital) contract, a valid ground for action in Victorian England. Angry women feature too in the bawdy and oft-banned satirical Irish poem, The Midnight Court (1780), by Brian Merriman. The women pleading at the court of Queen Aoibheall ascribe Ireland’s woes to the men’s failure to satisfy their sexual needs.[1] Here’s a flavour of the poem in Ciaran Carson’s robust 2005 translation:

By an oath on the Bible that day it was sworn,

A case that is clear and you cannot refute:

That for want of its use, there’s no spunk in the youth,

The numbers of weddings and offspring are down,

There’s depopulation in country and town,
. . .

Just as racial politics inform Lee’s novel so too they underpin Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun (1999), set in post-apartheid South Africa. Gordimer’s moral forensics are in turn inspired by Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the story of a patricide. Strangely, despite its title, Kafka’s nightmarish novel, The Trial (abandoned in 1915 and posthumously published in 1924), never actually gets to the courtroom, as poor Joseph K., mysteriously, or mistakenly, denounced, is sent from one office to another in search of information about his case. His trial is a psychological one. We’re all familiar with the writers who have made, and continue to make, a good living out of courtroom dramas, including John Mortimer, John Grisham and Michael Connolly.

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

What then are the elements that make a good courtroom drama and why are we so enthralled by the genre? The niceties of legal argument or interpretation of the law are rarely the point. Indeed many believe, like Dickens’ Mr. Bumble (Oliver Twist) that ‘the law is a – ass’.  It’s fairly obvious however that Bumble is the ass – if that’s not a mixed anthropomorphic metaphor. Justice is an abstract, and virtually absent concept, except in so far as we the audience invariably root for the accused and want ‘to see justice done’, which usually means vengeance for a wrongful accusation, or a veil drawn over the loopholes that might condemn them.

O bleak is the prospect and black is the day,

When Justice lies shackled, her laws disarrayed,

The weak so enfeebled, infallibly tied

To a future of fraud where no fairness abides;

Duplicitous lawyers, and crooks on the bench,

Hush money, slush funds, and all conscience quenched,

Where backhanders buy you a piece of the judge,

And everyone knows that the law is a fudge.

(The Midnight Court, trans. Ciaran Carson)

 From a dramatic standpoint the courtroom provides a perfect example of the unities of space and time allowing us to witness the proceedings unfold question by question, tension rising all the while. In The Goldman Case, which never leaves the courtroom, director Cédric Kahn wants members of the audience to feel like members of the jury. Based on fact, the dialogue/dialectic of the film is drawn from official court reports and Goldman’s autobiography. He is a charismatic figure, a rebel in search of a cause, appealing his conviction for a double murder, protesting that he is innocent because he says he is. Notwithstanding the actual outcome of the case we are left to wonder where the truth lies.

  Over the course of the film we learn about Goldman’s life and his parents whose participation in the Resistance during World War II so inspired him. His father’s testimony is moving and crucial to the court’s final decision. Similarly in Anatomy of a Fall an appeal to the emotions, this time by the child of the defendant, carries the day, in the absence of any concrete evidence to the contrary. This biographical aspect of the genre enhances its appeal, especially for dramatists and film makers. Instead of having to spell out the character’s life story in pedestrian fashion year after year from birth to the present, the salient points are brought out piecemeal, to serve the purpose of the lawyers on either side of the case.

We are shown several facets of the accused’s personality and biography, dark and light, with shades of interpretation that betimes reinforce or undermine their own version of their actions. (Don’t we all dream of our ‘day in court’ when we can justify ourselves to the world?) Half of the writer’s work is done by the prescribed ordinance of the court proceedings. The challenge is to introduce some variation or surprise into that familiar construct and keep us engaged.

Justice is blind - or so the theory goes

  Anatomy of a Fall won a Golden Globe for best screenplay, which seems apt given that it concerns two writers, she successful, he stalled. One line of argument in the court focuses on paragraphs in a novel by the accused, Sandra, indicating murderous thoughts. Her defence lawyer immediately points to the quotes being taken out of context and the judge intervenes to say they are not there to judge literature. Indeed. Later, however, we see a clip from a television programme in which a critic emphasises the parallels between Sandra’s life and her books. The writer’s life judged through her work.

A key question in the trial is whether Sandra ‘plundered’ Samuel’s idea for a novel, or did he permit her to use it. He has begun instead to transcribe recordings of their arguments. Her lawyer points out, correctly, that ‘transcription isn’t creation’. The courtroom scene folds in on itself. Is the trial truth, fiction or self-invention? As Marge, in Anatomy of A Fall says to the boy, Daniel, when there is an element missing from a situation or a story ‘you have to make a choice’. We, the audience, get to collaborate in the writing of the story, deciding for ourselves not who is innocent but who is least culpable.     

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     [1] For obvious reasons, I feel compelled to point out that this is a pastiche of an ‘aisling’, an allegorical poem in which a beautiful woman visits the poet in a dream and seeks his help in freeing her from an evil captor.

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Thank you for joining me today. As ever I love to receive your comments and feedback so please feel free to add your ideas on courtroom dramas here:

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