I’ll second that.
IANAPO, but 5 members of my family are–all now retired and/or died of natural (well, cancer from smoking) causes. Not one of them ever fired a gun other than on the practice range.
The procedure is, prosecution goes first in summation, then defense, then prosecution goes one last time. I think a lot of L&O is truncated…I’ve seen Stone/McCoy ask only one or two questions of a witness, and sometimes refer to testimony of other witnesses that the viewer didn’t see.
I recall reading that only half of all policemen fire a gun (other than in practice) during their careers. I also recall reading that on the average a policeman fires a gun once every 27 years (other than in practice). I can’t find any cite for this though.
ivylass has it right. The defense doesn’t “give up” the last word because it wasn’t theirs to give. The party with the burden of proof gets to go first and last, because they have to meet their burden. So in a civil case, that’s the plaintiff, and in a criminal case, it’s the prosecution.
Mostly, although there are things called “affirmative defenses,” which if you assert one, you have the burden to prove it. Self-defense, for example, is an affirmative defense to certain crimes, like murder. The prosecution has to prove you murdered the guy, and if they prove it (i.e., if they shift their burden), you then have the burden to prove your affirmative defense.
But otherwise, yes, if you’re not asserting an affirmative defense, a defendant simply must show that the prosecution hasn’t met its burden.
Slight hijack (but I started the thread and give permission):
A legal question I always wondered about My Cousin Vinnie (and yes I know it’s a movie, etc.) is this- suppose It’s obvious that Vinnie himself knew exactly what the picture held about the tire tracks and the car that made them (though it’s not for certain he knew exactly what model made them like his girlfriend did). If he Vinnie hadn’t been able to find Mona Lisa or he couldn’t compel her to testify (“No! I hate him!”), is there anyway he himself could have taken the stand to give the “there’s no way the two Utes car could have made these and here’s why” testimony?
My own favorite things about My Cousin Vinnie were the ways it portrayed small town Alabama- the people were definitely country and a bit hickish, but the judge had a degree from Yale, the prosecutor had computers/faxes [state of the art in 1991 or whenever it was filmed], and the courtroom was no-nonsense.
Of course, it has to be, because that’s the point; poor Vinny has never argued a criminal case before and doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. Setting him up to look foolish in front of a judge who’s a stickler for proper procedure is one of the film’s main sources of conflict and recurring jokes.
It is frequently implied that the investigation and trial for each episode occurs over a period of months; occasionally investigators go back an interview a previous witness and it is clear that this is occurring long after the initial investigation. They’re definitely just showing the highlights of investigation and trial, not only because they’re only covering a very small amount of pertinent information but because they also often cut into the middle of a scene in documentary-esque fashion.
The biggest thing that bothers me about Law & Order (the original series) is how tied the DA’s office is to the police. I don’t know about New York State but it is my understanding that most district attorneys’ offices often use their own group of investigators or contractors to perform follow-on investigation rather than going back to the original investigating detectives once the initial investigation is complete. It seems to happen a lot that they’re in trial and some tangent thread brought up by a witness pulls up an entirely new line of investigation, so they call back Eighth Precinct homicide and have them drop everything and follow up as if they don’t have other ongoing investigations to deal with. (That and poor Det. Profaci, who apparently doesn’t get to do anything but go out for hot dogs and pass on phone messages; he’ll never make First Grade the rate he’s going.)
They do offer a lot of plea bargain resolutions (and imply that less interesting cases are plea bargained as a matter of course) and otherwise indicate that expediency (and career building) frequently takes precedence over idealistic notions of justice, deal with rules of evidence, and otherwise generally eschew the histrionics and unexpected witness stand confessions, though. So, maybe it’s not utterly realistic (which I suspect would be yawn-inducing) but I suspect that it is generally as realistic as the entertainment aspect allows for.
I’d answer a question about what is the most realistic show about engineers, but I think that would be a very short and boring roster. I need to find a more interesting profession.
Stranger
How about Cop Rock?
I don’t know … Apollo 13 managed to be pretty gripping … .
My biggest problem with Law and Order is the constant reliance on very tenuous evidence. Can any prosecutors or defense attourneys say if this is realistic? Half the time, McCoy goes to trial essentially on somebody’s say-so, and usually that somebody usually has deeply dubious motives and only pointed the finger after the police leaned on him/her. In fact, in several episodes I’ve had no clue why they chose one defendant over the two or three others.
There’s an English exception to this rule, where the central character is a criminal defense lawyer, and you often don’t have a god’s-eye view: Rumpole of the Bailey. However, I suspect that English and American criminal practice are so different that only English lawyers would be able to tell us how accurate Rumpole is – though, since the author John Mortimer practiced as a QC, it is presumably reasonably accurate.
And seriously, mind-numbingly long hours, extraordinary stress, and jerkwad partners who may be able to manage cases, but have no idea whatsoever how to manage a business like a law firm.
At least for litigators, it seems to me (an outside observer) that it’s frequently not about the facts, but about quibbling over points of procedure and timing of things.
You could probably write a good law-firm based drama without going into the legal sides of it overly much, just due to the numerous sources of conflict naturally present. You wouldn’t have to have handicapped midget cases or anything like that- you could have 5 characters in one firm, and how they interact with each other, co workers and family.
[/list] [ul]
[li]Young hot-shot male attorney. Spend time on his flashy lifestyle.[/li][li]Experienced, unmarried female associate - follow her and her attempts at finding romance & balancing it with work.[/li][li]Married female associate with kids.[/li][li]Male partner- have him cheat or something.[/li][li]Secretary - have her dealing with everyone, and juggling something else on the side.[/li][/ul]
For a law show to be realistic, 90% of it would have the main characters sitting in front of computers and/or talking on the phone.
A Civil Action is probably the best representations I’ve seen. Either that or Bleak House! 
I think you’re remembering it wrong. Rebecca passed the bar on the first episode of season three, and for at least the first four seasons Bobby, Eugene, Lindsey and Eleanor were the only partners.
Rebecca becomes a partner in the same episode thet Eugene, Lindsey, and Eleanor do. It’s an error on the show’s part.
“A Civil Action” was pretty good because it was a mostly true story, but there was one scene so glaringly wrong it almost ruined the movie for me: the Rule 11 hearing. The idea that a civil litigation attorney and a federal judge would both be ignorant of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of frickin’ Civil Procedure is ludicrous. Other than that it was largely okay.
One surprisingly bad one was Perry Mason. The law and procedure in Perry Mason were so weird I couldn’t tell what the hell was supposed to be going on. One lawyer will jump up and shout “objection!” and then start ranting in booming tones for several minutes that the testimony being elicited “makes a virtual menagerie of this courtroom, yadda yadda yadda” making absolutely no sense. A lawyer doing that in real life would have a testy judge asking them “counselor, what is your legal objection??”. Real objections are just a few words: “objection, hearsay” or “objection, calls for speculation,” and maybe a brief discussion if the court calls for it.
L&O is pretty good, but it does have a few points that bug me (although I realize they’re largely necessary for the show). A big one for me is what I’ve started to think of as “The Big Sit Down.” Everyone’s seen it; a room at the jail, courthouse, or DA’s office, the prosecutor on one side of the table, the defendant and defense attorney on the other, prosecutor sharply confronts the defendant who hotly denies involvement, prosecutor reveals the damning evidence, defense attorney whispers in the defendant’s ear, defendant takes the deal/comes clean/rats out Mr. Big/lunges across table at prosecutor, whatever.
In reality, this rarely ever happens. The real scene is much less dramatic - the DA tells the defense attorney (me) the evidence and the plea offer, and I go out to the jail and tell the defendant what the DA said. If they’re clearly guilty and they really should take a deal, I’m the one arguing with them, not the DA. If they have some “information” that they think could help their case, they tell me, I go tell the DA, and DA sends a detective or investigator to come out and take a statement. The whole “Big Sit Down” myth causes me problems sometimes because defendants want to tell the DA their side of the story, just certain that if they could explain this whole big misunderstanding in person that the DA would drop all charges. I have to explain to them it’s not like television and the DA has no interest in talking to them.
I initally read this as Police Squad. Which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
Yeah that was his nickname for intern Jason Cabbagio. I read somewhere that the film was hung upside-down to symbolize the inexperience of the new doctors.
In those terms, yeah, I can buy that. The practical stuff is pretty much out there, though. This hospital seems to have a single ward that deals with coma patients, cancer, diagnostics, cosmetic surgery, emergency care, infectious diseases, and virtually everything else in the medical field. I always wondered if there are other wards in the hospital and if so, what the heck they do.