Are there any books or movies that have a character posthumously seek legal (i.e. not vigilante-style, eye for an eye revenge) justice for their own murder? Vampire, sentient ghost/zombie, something along those lines since I’m talking about characters who are really dead whilst looking for justice with help of the police/lawyers/the legal system.
Lee Killough wrote a nice little story on the theme.
It’s called “The Existential Man” and it’s about a cop solving his own murder; he doesn’t realize it was him (the corpse was badly decomposed) until the end.
Generally, though, the ghost, etc. does not use legal means.
Ghost is pretty close to what you’re looking for.
How about stories where the victim is worried about getting killed, and tells people, “No matter what it looks like, if I die in the near future, X did it.”
The Lovely Bones has this theme, though it has been a while since I’ve read it. As I recall the intent was mainly for the victim’s family to be able to identify the killer, whether the ultimate result was legal or vigilante revenge I don’t remember…
Eh, upon Wiki check that’s not quite right. The victim doesn’t so much seek justice as observe the grief of the survivors. Although there is some legal investigation and some individual seeking of answers, I don’t think it quite fits what you’re looking for.
There are a few films about people trying to solve their own murder before they die (slow acting but incurable poison usually) such as DOA and Crank. There was a recent movie about a teen who is apparently a ghost who could somehow regain life if able to solve his own murder. There’s another one coming out about a patient on the operating table who has an out of body experience and discovers people are plotting his murder and he has to prevent it.
I haven’t seen it, but isn’t that the plot of The Crow?
ETA: Either way, I’m netflixing it!
ETA again: Oops. you said legal justice. The Crow was vigilante justice. Stupid stupid stupid me…
The Invisible He’s not really dead, he’s just beaten into unconsciousness and is essentially astral projecting. He wakes up a few times in the pit they dumped him in, losing where he was watching. When they eventually find him, he is still alive, if just barely.
On the grand scale, there is James Morrow’s This is the Way the World Ends, where those killed (and those whose births are prevented) by a nuclear war come back to put one of the survivors on trial.
I saw a webcomic do exactly this story once, but I can’t remember its name. It was about a pair of trial lawyers who represented various supernatural entities in court, if anyone cares to search.
I recall a short story that would likely have appeared in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s anthologies about a man who, facing bankruptcy due to his business partner’s embezzlement, takes out a life insurance policy on himself and kills the partner, with the full expectation of facing execution for it, thus providing for his family through the insurance. If I find it, I’ll report back.
Slightly off-topic… someone could write a story about the dying declaration of someone who’s been murdered in which the victim implicates the killer. Under the rule of hearsay, dying declarations are admissible, reflecting the general Anglo-American view that what one says at death’s door is generally reliable. Oddly enough, some cultures don’t share that view. IIRC from law school, in some South Asian cultures, dying people will take one last chance to say all kinds of unpleasant things about their enemies, figuring it’s their final opportunity to do so.
Asimov’s Legal Rites has a ghost seeking legal justice, but it’s a case of property rights rather than homicide.
In Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon the ghost of the dead husband is summoned by a medium to give testimony at the trial of the bandit who was the (alleged) murderer.
The Vertigo miniseries Petrefax has a dead character seeking legal remedy. She must race against the clock as decay sets in.
Wow, it occurs to me that my post #11 is so ridiculously off-topic that I must have misunderstood the thread premise completely. The nature of the story I described was a man planning to commit suicide using the justice system.
I think Bill Shakespeare beat everyone to it with Hamlet.
No, that was about vigilante justice, i.e. Hamlet deciding whether or not to personally avenge his father. Specifically excluded by the OP.
There is a Japanese folktale where the ghost of a woman murdered by her husband accuses him and brings him to justice with the help of a kirin. Damned if I can remember the name of it, though. I know, I’m a great help, aren’t I?
Gary Wolf’s book Who Censored Roger Rabbit, interesting enough, has what is essentially an already-murdered Roger Rabbit looking for his killer (the book is WAY different from the movie), but I don’t recall now if he could be said to be seeking it via legal means.
It’s not exactly what the OP was asking for, but D.O.A. and its many remakes (and Der Mann, der seinen Morder sucht, the German original) have the very similar theme of fatally poisoned men seeking their killers before they die, although they tend, action-film-style, to go after their murderers themselves (although they do go to the police in the end)