The United States Constitution in Film by Kasper Eric T.;Vieregge Quentin D.;

Author:Kasper, Eric T.;Vieregge, Quentin D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A distraught Shelton cannot believe that the leader of such a brutal crime against his family will go free in a few years. As the film goes on, however, he is no longer the sympathetic victim, as he seeks vengeance not just on the criminals but also the members of the legal system who processed their cases.[83]

We do not know from the film why the DNA evidence was excluded, if it was for constitutional reasons or statutory reasons. What we do know is that Law Abiding Citizen utilized the same sort of approach that was taken in Dirty Harry, albeit in a less sophisticated manner. Moreover, the same flaws apply as well. Even if DNA and blood evidence from the Shelton home was excluded for Fourth Amendment problems (and it is not clear what those problems would be), other evidence could have been obtained, including from searches of the defendants’ vehicles, searches of their residences, or interrogations of the defendants. And as Shelton pointed out, he vividly remembered the defendants’ descriptions and was willing to testify. Thus, a strong case existed against both of these defendants, and it is not clear that the exclusionary rule destroyed the prosecution’s case without Darby’s plea deal. Nevertheless, Shelton’s turn to vigilantism also makes the point that the rights of the accused are important and cannot be ignored, even if the film does a relatively poor job of explaining what those rights are and why they apply.

As more time passed after September 11, 2001, films began to diverge more evenly again between those that favor the rights of the accused and those that saw them as hindrances to crime control. For a movie like The Town (2010), where innocent crime witness Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) asks FBI Agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) if she should have a lawyer present during her interview and he informs her that only guilty people bring lawyers,[84] there is a film like Horrible Bosses (2011), where Dale Arbus (Charlie Day) is able to comedically recall the requirements of probable cause under the Fourth Amendment to free from police custody himself, Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman), and Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis) when they were being investigated for a crime they did not commit.[85] And for every Arbitrage (2012) where a guilty Robert Miller (Richard Gere) is portrayed as getting away with murder because of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of constitutional rights,[86] there is a Gone Girl (2014), where we are reminded how important protecting the rights of the accused can be so that an innocent Nick Donne (Ben Affleck) would not be railroaded in a case where he was framed.[87] This ambivalence by Hollywood is likely to remain with us for the foreseeable future, as it is a reflection of the ambivalence that the American public—and the Supreme Court justices—continue to have over the constitutional rights of the accused.

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