The Conscience Of American Law, Lawyers And Society: A Critical Lens On Anatomy Of A Murderer

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“Twelve people go off into a room; twelve different minds, twelve different hearts, from twelve different walks of life; twelve sets of eyes, ears, shapes, and sizes. And these twelve people are asked to judge another human being as different from them as they are from each other. And in their judgment, they must become of one mind – unanimous. It’s one of the miracles of Man’s disorganized souls that they can do it, and in most instances, do it right well. God bless juries.” – Parnell McCarthy

Otto Preminger’s masterful film crafts and builds the events of a trial in a manner that isn’t dissimilar to summoning the unsuspecting viewer to jury duty in deciding matters of guilt, innocence, and sanity that are attached to a crime.

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The beauty of the film “Anatomy of a Murder” is in its carefully crafting the chair of the juror upon an unsuspecting viewer who is forced to deliberate on the conscience of the crime of murder. In carefully presenting often conflicting legal and personal caricatures of morality and law we are drawn to decide if there exists “justification” for violating the most fundamental of social contract theory. The utopian notion of the law existing independent to the fact that it itself lies in and will consequently be a product of its environment is challenged by the film’s portrayal of the ambiguity of the law blurring any typical film’s understanding of the notion of “right” and “wrong”. Directed by Otto Preminger who has a background in law, the film adapted from a book authored by Supreme Court Judge John. D Voelker offers an aura of illusion and uncertainty in its tale that challenges the apparent failure of the law to seemingly validate a violation of a societal norm on the basis of public conscience. The principle of scientific and empirical realism is the crowning attraction in the film narrative as the defense of “irresistible impulse” by a man who murder’s wife’s apparent rapist requires an overwhelming decision in the minds of the Court to decide not just judicially within the textbook of the law but a sociological expedition into the myriad of ideological bearings the human element to the law offers to decide whether Lt.Banion indeed was so enraged at the time of committing the crime that he acted outside the responsibility of his rational mind. This represents a “dissection” of law that a good lawyer commits towards in creating the right fiction of fact.

It takes no further than a look at perhaps the intentionally clever title of the film to trace an immediate connection to American Legal Realism’s pioneer Wendell Holmes “Bad Man” theory[footnoteRef:1] that forms a core of the American Realist school of judicial insight. Holmes having been referenced in the film itself, would provide a useful interpretation of the acquittal of the murderer as an example of the court system and within it the law, judges and the jury all pragmatic and conniving actors that transcend any misplaced and idealistic visions that the law may project. The overcoming of an ”unwritten law” from which even the gravest crime of murder represents a calculating or predictive ability of the offender to justify an implied largely cognized and rational violation of the right to life is brought out through the movie as Mr.Biegler leads Mr.Manion in creating his own defense for the crime (“Just try remembering how mad you were”) as he himself has an understanding the sympathy a jury could find themselves buried under as the husband of the woman who was traumatized by another ( an aspect the latter part of this essay will focus on). This prediction of who the bad man is along with whose sole preoccupation of reducing his degree of punishment is an ambition the Legal system must dexterously counter by itself predicting the behaviour and susceptibility of courts to sentiment and perception. [footnoteRef:2] [1: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,”The Path of the Law”, 10 Harvard Law Review 457] [2: The canon of American Legal Thought,p 22-26]

The true science of the law for Holmes represented an accurate measurement of the social desires of the public which are expressed using the law as an instrument. This preoccupation of what the courts may do rather than the law itself is an empirical attempt to un-mechanize a “neutral” or “objective” legal discourse and instead shifts focus on how decisions the courts arrive at incorporate an imperfect knowledge.[footnoteRef:3] This imperfect knowledge stems from the witnesses observation or recollection of the facts of the incident which would always remain a malleable version of the true nature of the incident as Lt.Manion exemplifies through his testimony as an accused looking to exploit the loophole of mental disability against the law of murder. Court decisions are taken on political biases and constructed from hunches and social dictat as there exists a natural indeterminacy in legal reasoning and language which the film brings out by constantly evoking suspicion of whether the murder was a cold and calculated one or whether even there existed any rape at all on which the actions of the accused have been blamed. [3: American Legal Realism, pp 109 -111]

There is a heavy challenge to the idea of any general legal concepts or rules having the sole power to determine the judgment of a case as there will always exist a logical gap that requires human intervention in their application under general premises. The Film in itself illustrates the struggle of the legal system to compound the factors of deceit, venality and morality that the participants in a trial pose to the formalist application of the law. The existence of “irresistible impulse” existing will not depend on the mere failure of mental faculty of a murderer but will be based on unstated biases or prejudices’ the judge and the jury responding to “the stimulus of fact” [footnoteRef:4] such the showmanship of the litigators and the demeanor of witness which far less relate to the crime itself and resorts to the emergence of conforming to popular public policy. The general presumption of this school of thought is that general principles cannot possibly derive the unique result each case must merit. The conceptual gap for the American school of thought is left to be covered by a belief in the empirical concept of social science which provided an understanding of how people actually behave and the effect of legal rules on the same. The foundation of American Legal Theory lies in discrediting the concept of universal truth and instead focusing on the practical reality of law being one which has “A life of experience over logic”.[footnoteRef:5] The “Pragmatic”[footnoteRef:6] cloak thrown by Holmes is one drenched skepticism what works as the reality of the law is one arising from the dynamic social and historical context reflective of its human construct. This critical approach paves the way for an understanding of the pervasive bias in the legal system, specifically in the case of the perspective of gender which is the focus the latter part of this paper will attach to. [4: Brian Leiter, “Legal Realism”, in A Companion to the Philosophy of law and legal theory.] [5: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law] [6: The Collected Works of Justice Holmes: The Complete Public Writings and Selected Judicial Opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr;]

The film places itself at a time in the 1950s where the woman’s question of societal subordination within the patriarchal paradigm was unapologetically silenced or airbrushed. The film is scattered with references to the flawed balance in socio-legal gender roles within the law reflecting the rampant gendered bias in the times prior to the emergence of dominant feminist discourse. The entire scope of the defense constructed for Lt.Manion by the smooth-talking Hero-lawyer Mr. Biegler is based on the flawed notions of honor and dependability through which women in society are linked to with men upon which there exists a compulsion to act. There is an unchallenged presumption during the course of the trial which modern Feminist theory would oppose that men are indeed the “custodians” or “protectors” of the female with their inability to conduct or behave as autonomous entities capable of exercising the same rational choices attributed in no small part to their sexual purity within the framework of their marriage; a private sphere which the law cannot penetrate[footnoteRef:7]. The plea of irresistible impulse as an “excuse” (and not justification as Mr.Biegler comments) to the murder argued that the accused was sent into a fit of rage so uncontrollable on hearing the violation of his wife, is one which would appeal to the hyper-masculine validation of the act of murder to protect the honor of his wife, backed by a certain amount of legitimacy within his immediate community. The assumption the judgment validates is that certain acts lie outside the ambit of the rational life governed by a rational code such as the law.[footnoteRef:8] [7: Per S. Benhabib, Situating The Self (1992), p. 109] [8: Brian Bix, Jurisprudence Theory context]

A rape trial as brilliantly portrayed in the film brings out a magnified difference of the male and female inhibition of separate “worlds” in front of the law. The law on rape is one of the most contentious issues for feminist legal theorists, and many feminists argue that gender bias is both open and hidden within this area of criminal law as it is easy for the public conscience to be affected by both hidden and apparent gender bias of the time to find refuge in a Freudian attribution to sexuality dominating the woman’s social sphere; the film itself nods to this as the three primary female characters involved are constantly connected to the story through their sexuality not to mention to the lack of sympathy and humor of dialogue thrown at the sensitive topic of examining a rape victim. A Rape trial however being limited to the binary of either consensual or non-consensual sexual fails to appropriate the ambiguity of rape in itself [footnoteRef:9] leaving the concept of submission entirely outside its purview. Mrs. Manion having submitted by failing to physically fend him off created a mist aura of consent in the courtroom as opposed to non-consent with the law’s “claim to truth” by asserting the version of events that are deemed the “only” truth. The film portrays a society guilty of subscribing to Catherine McKinnon’s theorizing of the man-made construct of law reflecting a picture male have painted of themselves.[footnoteRef:10] Women under such a discourse have been denied the right of a liberal equal under the ‘public ‘ eyes of the law owing to their dominion in the private sphere as eyes of the law as tools in male subjectivity and Sexual objectification which the private handicap of the disadvantage of living within a patriarchal construct that debilitates the public forum of law as gender-equal. [9: Carol Smart; Feminism and the law., Pathologizing Female Sexuality in a Phallocentric Culture p. 28- 32] [10: Catherine McKinnon., Feminism unmodified]

This inherent bias of the law by placing the burden on the prosecution rather than the witness to prove consent invites prejudice as consent is a question of the victim’s state of mind at the time of the act is one that cannot presumably be brought out with authenticity by an external party without reinforcing the deep-seated notions of natural male sexual need and female capriciousness[footnoteRef:11]. It is often the victim rather than the accused who is tried unlike cases of contract or tort law where the onus of proof is to prove the presence of a certain condition rather the absence of it, a process who women that give evidence in court describe the process as being ‘as traumatic as the rape itself”. [footnoteRef:12] [11: Carol Love; Feminism and the Power of the Law; The Rape Trial, p. 34-36] [12: Su Lees]

The public construction of perception and expression of women is always a central concept of legal reasoning as the film depicts “the women’s Question” presented by Katherine Barlett [footnoteRef:13]would centre on how despite the premise of the film focusing on the wrongdoings of one or both the murderer and the victim, it is often the woman who despite being a victim herself is villainized and portrayed as a flirtatious character aware of the attention her attractiveness incites and as one character puts it “The kind men love to take advantage of “. Her concept of ‘feminist practical reasoning’[footnoteRef:14] would be useful to point out the gender implications of rules and practices which the law heralds as objective and sound. ‘The feminist perspective would seek to challenge the idea of there should even exist relevancy in such character portrayals whilst dealing with a particular sexual assault; after all what a woman wears, where she goes and with whom, or her own sexual preferences an choices can in no way construct an appropriate picture of consent at the time of a particular incident. This would cater to the prevailing notion of the “aggressive- contractual” model of holding that women’s sexually provocative behavior gives rise to an almost contractual agreement to have sex owing to the male’s own inability to control his sexuality beyond a certain point. It takes for granted that a woman’s every action could be misinterpreted as sexually teasing from the perspective of this sexually uncontrollable man who would be cheated if she were to anyway alter or withdraw the sexual ”consent” she is deemed to provide irrespective of her own intentions. This introduces the uncomfortable and traditional view of rape not as a crime against the victim herself but rather as the “property” of man. [13: On Barlett, see S. Williams (1993) 8 Berkeley Women’s LJ. 63, 90-104] [14: On Barlett, see S. Williams (1993) 8 Berkeley Women’s LJ. 63, 90-104]

The sense of apathy provided throughout the movie to Mr.Manion as the victim of a crime committed upon his wife constantly resonates through the defense arguments and only serves to prove that the straightforward understanding the crime of rape as primarily a crime against women, is actually a surprisingly revolutionary idea. Barlett’s tool of “consciousness-raising is meant to unearth inherent oppression by voicing these concerns collectively through a cohesive understanding of women’s oppression. An example of this is Rowland’s solution to deal with the ambiguity of a woman’s account which the law currently treats as evidence against her, by the use of psychologists and other experts to examine the victim for the psychological reaction to rape thereby ensuring the ball remains in the right court.

Thus in the acquittal of the accused there exists an inescapable feeling of an almost cheated feeling of justice as murder is allowed to walk the streets free on what could very well be fraudulent and intentional exploitation of what should be a soundproof law with as few exceptions as possible especially in the absence of immediate provocation. Having said that, the apparent unshakeable thought of having been brought forth of the punishment of an apparent rapist by death ( though representing vigilantism that has no place to exist parallel to the court system) would appeal to the notion of retributive justice American Society at the time lauded. It is important to note the failure of the realist commitment to Sociological support as Psychoanalytic evaluation could provide its own inherent bias to the representation and consequential manipulation of fact in the accuser’s examination. Most telling is the absence of a prosecuting psychiatrist who was to counter any such confusion as to the presence or absence of mental consciousness to ensure the victim instead of assuming his own position in the eyes of the law is assigned one rightfully

Above all the concept of “The truth” ultimately is what is decided by the judge and jury and not the letter of the law itself however comprehensive it may deem itself to be. There are complex layers of considerations and factors interwoven in the arrival of a decision through an interpretation which should form the concentration of legal theory as the courts must maintain a delicate balance between equality and specific variance in the application of the law that requires that no case be adjudged on its own merits. India has taught the tribulations a jury system comes with by the similar trial of K.M Nanavati [footnoteRef:15]that the Jury system comes with the human blemish of undue influence through the public hysteria of a media campaign and gossip creating a blur in the lines of fact and fiction compromising the legitimacy of the entire process as violators are protected by harsh criminal laws, with the system duly abolished since. [15: KM Nanavati Vs. State of Maharashtra 962 AIR 605 1962 SCR ]

It is upon the law where cultural understandings of right conduct and understanding are to be conciliated, acting as a catalyst to a production of the same instead of the changing of the interpretation of the law itself as a product of external cultural changes. The realists unintentionally create confusion between law and ethics each of which represents a different normative field, legal norms such as the norm of conduct or prohibition along with the altruistic moral ethos.[footnoteRef:16] Between the two there exists a gap between the observable realities and the elements of the same reality which are to be bridged by the forceful flexibility of the judiciary in taming a doctrine of precedent as well as the concealed factors in making a decision. [16: M.D.A Freeman; Introduction to Jurisprudence]

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