Because Capone and his lawyer had taken the precaution of buying off (or intimidating) the previous jury members. They knew a new impartial jury would find him guilty, so they copped a plea.
Yes, from a legal point of view it doesn’t make any sense - the correct thing to do if the jury had been bribed would be declare a mistrial and start a new one, not replace the jury halfway through. And an attorney can’t enter a guilty plea without the agreement of their client.
The jury-switch thing was both dramatic and nonsensical, granted.
Aside from that: this is one of that handful of big-budget popular movies made about corruption. (Chinatown being the other obvious example.) As such I’m fond of it—most ‘fight against the power’ filmed stories are less explicit in showing the nuts and bolts of how human institutions become corrupt. And this one is wildly entertaining.
eta: I’m a big fan of David Mamet’s way with dialogue, and this movie is a pip of an example.
and yes the real Elliott Ness was a “geek” and looked like the insurance agent he became and him and Capone supposedly never met face to face
There was a series by Cameron Crowe where it was more realistic on how it all worked except it makes the untrue assumption that the NY and chi mafia hated each other …Capone was part of the 5 points gang and only stayed in Chicago because Luciano told him to and helped him get up there
Took me forever to find out that the DA in that scene was played by Clifton James, who you might recognize as redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper in Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun. In fact, if you needed a redneck sheriff in your movie, he was the guy to call; but he could be serious when needed.
If they started a new trial from scratch, that would have meant the same jury selection process as the first, and the same opportunity for Capone to bribe the new jury. I always figured the jury switch was done as a way to bring in a surprise jury that couldn’t have been influenced.
wrong Crowe but here’s some info on it . one reason if didn’t get renewed is forysthe publicly stated he hated playing capone and a lot of places that aired the show buried it at odd hours of the day but i thought there was more than one season …
Here’s what really happened per wiki, and yes shenanigans:
*Tax evasion
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
IRS investigation of Al Capone
Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt recognized that mob figures publicly led lavish lifestyles yet never filed tax returns, and thus could be convicted of tax evasion without requiring hard evidence to get testimony about their other crimes. She tested this approach by prosecuting a South Carolina bootlegger, Manley Sullivan.[67] In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sullivan that the approach was legally sound: illegally earned income was subject to income tax; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. rejected the argument that the Fifth Amendment protected criminals from reporting illegal income.[68]
The IRS special investigation unit chose Frank J. Wilson to investigate Capone, with the focus on his spending. The key to Capone’s conviction on tax charges was proving his income, and the most valuable evidence in that regard originated in his offer to pay tax. Ralph, his brother and a gangster in his own right, was tried for tax evasion in 1930. Ralph spent the next three years in prison after being convicted in a two-week trial over which Wilkerson presided.[69] Capone ordered his lawyer to regularize his tax position. Crucially, during the ultimately abortive negotiations that followed, his lawyer stated the income that Capone was willing to pay tax on for various years, admitting income of $100,000 for 1928 and 1929, for instance. Hence, without any investigation, the government had been given a letter from a lawyer acting for Capone conceding his large taxable income for certain years. In 1931, Capone was charged with income tax evasion, as well as with various violations of the Volstead Act (Prohibition) at the Chicago Federal Building in the courtroom of Judge James Herbert Wilkerson.[70] U. S. Attorney George E. Q. Johnson agreed to a deal that he hoped might result in the judge giving Capone a couple of years, but Judge Wilkerson had been aware of the deal all along and refused to allow Capone to plead guilty for a reduced sentence. On the second day of the trial, Judge Wilkerson overruled objections that a lawyer could not confess for his client, saying that anyone making a statement to the government did so at his own risk. Wilkerson deemed that the 1930 letter to federal authorities could be admitted into evidence from a lawyer acting for Capone.[71][72][73]Much was later made of other evidence, such as witnesses and ledgers, but these strongly implied Capone’s control rather than stating it. The ledgers were inadmissible on grounds of statute of limitations, but Capone’s lawyers incompetently failed to make the necessary timely objection; they ran a basically irrelevant defense of gambling losses.[74] Judge Wilkerson allowed Capone’s spending to be presented at very great length. There was no doubt that Capone spent vast sums but, legally speaking, the case against him centered on the size of his income. Capone was convicted on October 17,[75][76] and was sentenced a week later to 11 years in federal prison, fined $50,000 plus $7,692 for court costs, and was held liable for $215,000 plus interest due on his back taxes*
Not too long ago, I saw a documentary in which the jury switch was a real thing, regardless of how the movie portrayed it. Did it not actually happen?
I saw the movie when it came out and did not care for it at all, especially the casting of Kevin Costner and the direction of Brian de Palma. It was more some screenwriter’s fantasy of what could have happened than anything approaching reality. The best thing about it was Ennio Morricone’s music score.
a question I’ve always wanted to be answered is in the tv series pilot al’s in Florida partying hearitly and its 2 or 3 am
It cuts to a neighbor who is woken up by this and hes pissed off and asks a butler type of guy " who the hells making all that noise" they tell him " its someone named al Capone"
guy says " who the hell is he and what does he do ? " other guy answers well rumor has it he’s a bootlegger in Chicago "bootlegger? don’t we have a justice department for that ? "yes sir we do " get them on the phone … guy dials a number and says “we need to check out this al Capone guy i wanna know who the hell he is " voice on the phone says " ill have them get on it right away” then it cuts to a shot of his desk and you see the name Herbert Hoover on those little signs they used to have alleging the only reason he was investigated in the first place was he personally pissed off hoover
The judge didn’t switch the juries because of the jury list of bribes they found in Nitti’s coat. He explicitly says “it constitutes no evidence, it has no provenance.”
The judge switches the juries because Ness tells him his (the judge’s) name is in the ledger, too.
You have to stop thinking about the film like it was a historical recreation. It’s much more of an action melodrama, like the films John Woo was starting to make at the time. Any historical accuracy was purely coincidental.
But what if there are people in that jury who would have been eliminated during selection? What if it included the cousin of someone who worked for Capone, or the brother-in-law of a cop killed during the gang wars?
And you have to start the trial over again anyway. The accountant had already testified, and the new jury didn’t hear that.
By the way, and in case the OP is unaware, the shootout at the train station is famously an homage to a similar scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, a silent film from the Soviet Union and made in 1925.
“Some day we’re going to chew our way through Daddy’s entire DVD collection. Including “Battleship Potemkin.” Pay attention to the baby carriage going down the steps, honey. Why? Because other movies will have baby carriages going down the steps, and it’ll be a reference to this. *So? *You’ll feel a special thrill knowing what the filmmaker is referring to. You might even point it out to your boyfriend. If he curtly says “I know” you’ll feel a little stupid, which will – and should – make you feel annoyed that he’s dismissive of something that really isn’t common knowledge. If he says “Battleship Galactica?” you know you have a loser on your hands, unless of course he’s referring to the Ronald D. Moore version, which was a rather interesting reinterpretation of a banal, pop-cult pre-post-Lucas creation myth. But! If he gets a shine in his eyes and says “I didn’t know you were a fan of Soviet cinema! Have you seen Vertov’s ‘Man with the Movie Camera’?” you’ll be able to say yes!
