Judge Aberdale (James Allen) in The Jury: Murder Trial Photo: Channel 4
From the beginning of time Man has sought to separate the rich dramatic yolk of a real courtroom from the tedious whites of a real legal procedure.
A few weeks ago at the Old Bailey, at the manslaughter trial of Constance Marten and her common-law husband, Mark Gordon, a «weather expert» testified during the afternoon, citing the days that Marten and Gordon were in running, and it was especially cold.
That same day, an Argos tent was erected in the center of Court 17 to illustrate the type of tent Gordon and Marten might sleep in. The jury was asked to examine the fabric. The couple actually got inside.
This is the everyday reality of judicial life. Futures hang in the balance as wigged women point to stacks of three ring binders and announce, “If Your Honor would refer to Section A, Part 13…” Polite silence, scraping of pens, slight coughing.
No matter how well this script is covered, it will struggle to get onto ITV in prime time. It is also illegal to film in the courts of England and Wales. Thus, any television producer who enters this territory is immediately faced with two seemingly insoluble problems: how to film the case and how to make it dramatic.
Peter Egan at ITV Royal Court Photo: ITV/Shutterstock
In the 1970s, an ITV series called The Royal Court used fictitious cases with real juries. Their unpredictability was built into the performance — the actors prepared different endings, depending on which direction the jury would turn. It became a staple of the day.
In the 1990s, Channel 4 decided to hire real lawyers to try the Ian Huntley of the time, King Richard III. At this distance, the show is perhaps most memorable for its cross-examination of young doctor David Starkey, who suffered from dyspepsia.
In 2010, Hat Trick Productions created a show for ITV called Trial By Jury. It was a fake case involving celebrities. The raw pathos of this is perhaps evidenced by the fact that Timmy Mallett was among the dozen. Robert Kilroy Silk, Derek Acora and Julian Clary also took part. Twelve Angry Men wasn't.
But this week, the new four-part documentary series «The Jury: Murder Trial» made one of television's best attempts at capturing the special drama of a real, verbatim, end-to-end court case.
< p>The show's producers selected one murder trial from the past 15 years, paid £6,000 for a full transcript, and then built their own set at the Old Bailey, hiring actors prompted by headphones to reenact every moment from the seven-day trial. By the end of the show, the verdict was in.Jury: Murder trial. Channel 4. 21:00, Monday 26 to Thursday 29. #TheJuryC4 #C4TheJury @Channel4 pic.twitter.com/SJ1yPl0CQf
— ScreenDog Productions (@ScreendogP) February 21, 2024
The case at hand concerns the defense of manslaughter by «loss of control.» To do this, it is necessary to show that a “reasonable person”, faced with a provocation of this level, would attack him without any prior preparation.
The twist is that, unbeknownst to each other, there are actually two jurors watching the same trial, separated only by a soundproof partition. We watch them deliberate — an obvious no-no in a real-life trial, where the Contempt of Court Act 1981 prohibits jurors from even explaining the reason for their verdict. Will they come to the same answer?
Ed Kelly runs Screendog, the production company behind The Jury: Murder Trial. He is something of a court buff who attended his local Crown Court in Lewes. Therefore, he had long suspected that reality was stranger and more dramatic than any scenario.
«I don't believe — when you actually hear a real case — I don't think there are many writers who could create that level of confusion and complexity.»
It's on this complex frontier that the show trades. It plays with our sympathies in a way that is immediately obvious — because the occasion has clearly been chosen to steer us first one way, then the other — and powerfully so. You may suspect what will happen, but it compels you nonetheless, because we are always aware that it actually happened: it was someone's confusing, overwhelming reality. And now 12 people are legally forced to extract at least some truth from this.
Channel 4: Trial: Murder in the Family (2017) Photo: Joss Barratt
“Channel 4 had a series called Murder Trial and Family in 2017,” says Kelly. “Which was much closer in tone to what we were doing. But it was a fictitious case, a domestic murder. The jury was asked to take this very seriously. But you didn't really get a good look into the minds of the jury, which I thought would have been interesting.»
Also, since it was made up, there was no truth behind the story. “And without the truth, it inherently seems a little random. Because no matter what decision they make, you say: well, okay, yes…
On the other hand, his show has a keel that continues to pull us back upright. In fact, the most powerful moment may be the very last seconds, when the actual verdict of a real jury in the main case flashes on the screen.
This is a worthy advertisement for the British judicial system. But, as perhaps expected, this is a jumbled account of the jury system. We're promised that the jury will be made up of our peers, but by taping the inside of the jury room, the show reveals that those peers, it turns out, are not synonymous with «people like me.» In fact, they are people just like other people.
A real jury is not a dinner party of polite people; it's like pouring the contents of a London bus into a stuffy conference room. The question that the Jury poses to us is this: If it were you, would this actually be an adequate way to decide how you will spend the next 30 years?
The Channel 4 jury is deliberating. Photo: Channel 4
The 24 jurors are a horrific demonstration of the entirety of human life. Only a few of them act purely mentally. Others are bags of harsh feelings. Some are motivated only by their own backstory—past experiences that resonate with what this case shows. In fact, one of the most shocking and entertaining moments is a juror who accidentally writes off the time his wife intentionally ran over him with a car after they argued, breaking his leg. To this day, he is still happily involved with his failed assassin. (Warning: Spoilers follow.)
We watch as each jury is influenced by some of the most prominent individuals. In particular, how one Essex builder, with his own history of gratuitous anger, «red fog» as he calls it, manages to cajole, cajole and harass the others into lowering charges of manslaughter.
When the tide turns decisively in his favor, he lets out a “Yeah!” as if Harry Kane had just shot past the German left-back. It's not quite the same as putting on a black hat.
Meanwhile, at the Blue Jury, as the case begins to build around a murder verdict, we see the final three holdouts first begin to weaken and then crumble as the weight of the eyes turned on them shatters their resolve.
“I don’t quite understand why I changed,” says the last dissenter in her posthumous interview. But we all know why: that's how peer pressure works, and in the long run it's probably more of a feature than a bug of the jury system.
The defense team and the court clerk in a murder case are all played by actors. Photo: Channel 4
It is based on the 2012 Norfolk case of sculptor Thomas Crompton, who murdered his wife Angela, a short-tempered, often hostile person who had been diagnosed by her psychiatrist as having a “cluster B” personality disorder. She was difficult, the argument goes, but so difficult that you could forgive her if you hit her skull with a hammer three times?
Kelly says the production team was prepared for it to come out, but he has no comment on the case itself — the point the team was trying to make was the capricious nature of justice. “We are not trying to conduct a trial through the media. We're canceling the jury trial. These are two completely different things.”
The film crew contacted both sides of the case: the families of the victim and the killer. The latter did not want to talk. But the ex released a statement at the end of the show, saying she was greatly missed.
“Oxford experiments in the late 1970s showed that in a quarter of all trials, the verdict would be a different jury.” , he says. «A quarter! That's 2,000 cases a year.»
He believes jurors should be able to justify their verdicts. And perhaps unsurprisingly, he advocates for a fully televised court system in England, noting that in this country 99 percent of trials receive absolutely no press coverage of any kind.
Here he agrees with one of the show's stars: former North West England Chief Crown Prosecutor Nazir Afzal. “Nazir is passionate about this. He's been talking about trials live on air for a long time.»
However, there is a difference between a spectacle to be made and a spectacle to be made. America offers a simple counterpoint. Court television has long broadcast footage of defendants attacking their lawyers. In Miami, where the laws are the most lenient, an entire show, «Court of Protection,» was built around filming events in one courtroom presided over by Judge Carroll Kelly, administrative judge of the Dade County Domestic Violence Unit.
Check out the week in #domesticviolencecourt in Miami-Dade County. Judge Carroll Kelly and court staff are committed to ensuring the safety of victims, holding offenders accountable, and coordinating an effective community response to domestic violence. Full video: https://t.co/2vTkvVBJom pic.twitter.com/gdNKtoa6LI
— Center for Justice Innovation (@innovjustice) February 18, 2020
In some parts of America, once the justice system gets a hold of you, you become public property, and all the many minor embarrassments associated with broadcasting your life publicly become public knowledge, regardless of your guilt or innocence.
In England and Wales, by contrast, despite all the government's periodic hand-waving about open justice, the profession is still literally run from medieval monasteries by a self-selecting guild. These people don't want to be stared at.
Of course, as with the emphasis on the “reasonable man” in our common law, there is a softer position of synthesis. North of the border, media laws are different. And over the last few years they have allowed BBC Scotland film crews to film a show at their High Court, mistakenly also called Murder Trial, which began in 2020 with an excellent series about the disappearance of Margaret Fleming. We watch edited hearings with minimal voiceover, but hear some post-game analysis from the lawyers themselves. The style is dark and brooding, the palette is limited.
After all, for our world to exist, we must all continue to believe in the holy fiction that earthly justice can be brought about by a few random people banded together to chat. To maintain this illusion, it is also necessary to preserve the inherent grandeur of the courts.
And if there's one lesson from The Jury: Murder Trial, perhaps we shouldn't focus too much on magic.
Свежие комментарии