Justice - ongoing thread (1 Viewer)

[Joe_H]

Anyone watch the episode last night, Shotgun? It was pretty good. I liked how at the end, instead of just showing what really happened, they showed the jury deliberating over the case as well, it was a nice change.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Normally the jury would have been shown what happened in a reconstruction by TNT&G's expert. In this case they just had the bare idea of suicide without being able to discuss the mechanism, so the jury had to discover the unlikely truth on its own - and because the truth was so unlikely, we had to see them do it. (In the actual case this show was based on, the defense did figure out that the dead women had shot herself by using her toe to trigger the shotgun. But in her husband's first trial he was convicted because the person who did the in-court demostration muffed it. She didn't understand how the gun was supposed to have been fired or what position the victim had been in, and she made it look like it would have been impossible for the victim to have fired the shotgun herself. (I think the witness was a last minute replacement for the person who was supposed to given the demonstration. She got the job because she was approximately the same size as the victim, which was crucial, but she wasn't adequately briefed or rehearsed. The first time she saw the shotgun was in court, IIRC.) I'm pretty sure the husband's lawyers won him a new trial and he was acquitted when a correct demonstration of the suicide was shown to the jury. (I'm remembering this from an old A&E Foresnics Files - I think - so forgive me if the details are hazy.)

In the dramatized case they didn't have time for all that and went with having the jurors - specifically the juror who had smiled at Tom and who he kept despite Ron's advice - figure it out and reach the correct verdict. Which was another reason for doing things the way they did them.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Patrick Sun]

All in all, a decent episode, I watched it because there was nothing else on that interested me in the 8 p.m. timeslot on Friday.

 

[Nick Martin]

I'm just grateful for seeing the remaining episodes, though I missed so much of it due to technical glitches on both the HD and SD channels.