For all the real legal professionals on this board: What are the most egregious legal errors on court shows such as Law and Order? I’m talking about the kind of stuff that would just never happen in a courtroom in the real world, or, if it did, the bailiff would be hauling someone’s ass to jail on contempt charges.
For instance, every episode of Law and Order features a scene where one attorney says something extremely inflammatory to a witness, the other attorney says “Objection!”, and the first attorney immediately says “Withdrawn.” Sometimes, the first attorney says “Withdrawn” before the other attorney even has a chance to object. I believe someone on this board once said that no real judge would ever tolerate such conduct.
What else?
Note: When I say “court show,” I don’t mean Judge Judy, where such things happen all the time.
“Do I look like I have stupid written on my forehead?!”
"No, Your Honor — "
“Then shut up!”
I used to date a lawyer. I learned to never take her to a courtroom drama movie. She’d be bitching all the time about the errors. Her biggest complaint was the old SURPRISE WITNESS trick which seemed to happen a lot.
My dad’s a lawyer, and he gets…I don’t know what it’s called, California Lawyer, or something like that. The magazine of the California Bar Association. A few years ago, they had an article on this topic (I was browsing in the bathroom), and they judged the most egregiously incorrect courtroom scene to be the one in the movie Philadelphia, where Tom Hanks opens his shirt to display his KS lesions. This is after it’s made clear that it didn’t matter that he had lesions because they were hidden by his clothing and no one had seen them. It’s a dramatic moment in the movie, but it’s apparently terrible law and no real judge would have allowed it.
They aren’t “errors”, since TV shows and movies are made to entertain and not to be accurate representations of reality. The writers, directors, producers, and actors all know that. Hopefully the audience also knows that. Everything that happens on a TV show is quite intentional and therefore not an “error”.
What you’re trying to say is where do court shows differ from reality most dramatically?
What? It’s a pet peeve of mine that there are still many people who act like if something happens on TV differently than it would happen in reality (i.e. pretty much everything that happens on TV), then a grievous sin has been committed. It was carefully crafted that way for dramatic effect, not to be a documentary.
More than half the time it isn’t “carefully crafted” but a default of laziness or ignorance.
If not done well it makes suspension of disbelief more difficult. Sometimes it only has this effect on people of a particular career genre, other times it affects everyone. There’s a bit of an uncanny valley factor here - if the work obviously presents itself as being in a cartoonish universe, then difference from reality are easier accepted, but if the work is presented as our world other than one or two ‘mistakes’ that aren’t part of the premise it can be very jarring to the audience. If the contention of the author is that the fictional universe differs in some important way from our own that will factor into the dramatic resolution, it needs to be set up before hand.
Certain things are effectively “cheating” - that is, the dramatic tension or problem is dependent on reality based factors whereas the solution or dramatic resolution is based on a reality opposed factor. Deus ex machina can be an example. So can court procedures that dramatically stack things against the defendant based on real world court procedures but then free them based on something unrealistic or vice versa.
California Lawyer is a private publication sent free to all registered California attorneys by the Los Angeles Daily Journal Corporation, a legal newspaper. The California Bar Journal is the official publication, and they are going to cease dead trees and start sending out their propaganda by email either this month or next month.
Daredevil, starring Ben Affleck. Despite its reputation, it had a lot in it that did not suck. On the other hand, the opening scene has Matt Murdock somehow representing the *victim *of a rape in a criminal trial. This is far more egregious an error of standard American jurisprudence than, say, surprise witnesses or inadmissible evidence.
The only time I’ve ever been on a jury, something similar has happened and I was surprised because I remember having been told it would never happen in a “real” case. It was either the quick “Objection - withdrawn” or the “Objection - sustained” or “Objection - overruled” trope. At any rate I was expecting more explanation of the objection that did not occur. (Then again there were far fewer of these, and objections at all, than in courtroom dramas, but also, slightly more than I had expected.)
How about civil cases getting hearing dates the same month the case gets filed?
Fetching McShortskirt:“Your honor, my client is suing Big Smelly Corporation for damages caused by their burying 800 cubic miles of Mutateatonium underneath the Adorable Cherub Preschool”
The movie “A Civil Action” portrayed a lawyer and federal judge as being largely ignorant of a federal rule of civil procedure that a first year law student would know.
Not exactly a legal error, but wrong nonetheless: “the big sit down,” the archetypal across-the-table confrontation between the defendant, his lawyer and the DA. The DA confronts the defendant with the damning evidence, his lawyer whispers urgently in his ear, occassionally he blurts out a confession, etc. Very dramatic, but in real life the DA very rarely sits down with the defendant and his lawyer to discuss the case - he conveys info and offers to the defense attorney, who then conveys them to the defendant. This sometimes causes problems for the defense attorney, who has to break it to the defendant that the DA isn’t going to come out to the jail and listen to their airtight alibi.
In Examination in Chief (Direct Examination for the US) the Counsel is with few exceptions, not allowed to ask leading questions. On TV, what do you know, it is Chief and they are leading like crazy with no objection raised by opposing cousel or the judge.
You often see witnesses breaking down in Cross examinations and admitting that their story is a lie they cooked up to fry the defendant along. In reality that almost never happens the witness sticks to their story even if you have blasted a hole the size of jupiter in their account.
Also, what is it with all the witness coaching you see on TV. The Lawyers practicing cross with the witnesses. I can’t think of any juridiction that would allow that.
Interesting fact: in the 1999 movie Double Jeopardy, starring Tommie Lee Jones and Ashley Judd, we find out that if you are convicted of murdering your husband, but in fact your husband had faked his death and arranged to have you convicted of his murder, then when you get out of jail you can find your still-alive husband and shoot him without legal repercussions since bringing you to trial for the shooting would violate the Fifth Amendment of the US constitution.