Legal philosophiser to appeal to any intelligent person

Rating: 10/10 (1 March 2017)

There are, that I know of, two legal systems, the Anglo-Saxon adversarial system and the French system. The French system has judge and jury as paid legal officials. The idea behind that is that trained and experienced legal officials at all stages of the process can deliver a better verdict. But the weakness is that such a system is more open to political corruption. In the English system there is judge, jury - made up of ordinary people who are drafted - and barristers. With some tweaks, the American system follows the British system.
Which is the better? An un-answerable question but a fascinating one.
I have always thought there is a moral ambiguity at the heart of this film. The number of genuinely decent, intelligent, educated and well-meaning jurors seems to be outweighed by the number of bigoted, prejudiced, mentally lazy and ill-educated ones. In the latter category, what psychologists today call those affected by 'motivated reasoning', made founding US father Alexander Hamilton distrustful of pure democracy and hence his electoral college to elect the President. So this film is a powerful disquisition on both the Anglo-Saxon jury system and democracy. Actually, any legal system is intimately a reflection of the political system.
The moral core of the film is Henry Fonda, of course, whom Republicans today would call a 'bleeding-heart liberal'; certainly some of the characters in the film called him that more or less literally so that conservative pejorative labelling is not new. His willingness to give the young defendant, accused of killing his father, in what some of the jurors lazily called an 'open and shut' case, what you Americans call a 'fair shake' is what drives the plot. Then other jurors, better intentioned, rally to his standard and others less enlightened subsequently rally to his standard, as most people do to a true leader, one of his persuasive qualities and of his quality of character, if only to follow the tide of loyalty.
One of the jurors calls Henry Fonda's character an exponent of the soft-sell. But that plain-Joe juror doesn't understand the difference between selling marmalade, which is the latter's job, and intelligence allied to a genuine conscience, which are the hall-mark qualities of Henry Fonda's 'architect' persona.
Solon, the ancient Greek lawgiver, was once asked what would it take for justice to come into this world. He replied that justice would only come into this world if enough people who did not suffer injustice would feel for those who did. We are not there yet.
In any film, play or novel a successful one is one in which all the leading characters are well-rounded and you feel that if you met them on the street you would recognise them immediately. This the film amply fulfills. Apart from anything else, the film is a master-class in top American actors of the late fifties.
I would certainly like a Henry Fonda character on my jury if I ever faced murder in the first degree.
But the curious thing is, the curious thing is, that on reviewing the evidence as it is presented in the film and despite the attempt at rebuttal which is the agenda of this film, I think the evidence stacked more against the defendant than for him! But I repeat, I would surely pray for a Henry Fonda character on my jury.
One of the characters in the Sidney Lumet's excellent 'The Verdict', (1982) a wise old black doctor, (I likee how it was so aptly described as a 'legal Rocky') consoles Paul Newman's lawyer with the sentence that juries can sometimes surprise one in the rightness of their verdict. I guess for all its faults the Anglo-Saxon version of justice is the better.