The film was very comedic from start to finish; the entire cast did a good job in their performance. Shockingly, the trial performance seemed more accurate than the other films that were viewed; this is despite the fact that it seemed more oriented towards being a slice-of-life film than a Law-related film.
An interesting segment of the film is the Police utilizing information to their benefit for the sake of winning the case. Although, the veneer of comedy overshadows it; the police chief using the term “I shot him” from Vinny’s nephew as a means of arguing the nephew confessed to the murder expresses a dimension of how testimony can be disingenuously expressed. Within the actual context of the conversation, the nephew was asking a question but reading it aloud to the jury from a piece of paper made it sound like a confession.
In real life, there have unfortunately been cases of police skirting the law even worse to gain a confession. People’s ignorance can and will be used against them by all parties. Complacency can be more dangerous than speaking out against such injustices.
The two worst offenders of lawful injustice, that I’ve learned, are the public duty doctrine and one of the focal reasons the violence against women act needed to be passed.
One of the chief reasons the violence against women act had to be reauthorized in 2012 was because women who lived in Native American Tribal areas had no legal right to sue their rapists in court. This led to generations of Native women needing to seek rape kits and healthcare assistance for their daughters – in some cases needing to teach them what to expect since they had no legal right to sue any rapists – because of the overwhelming amount of Native American women being attacked and raped by U.S. Citizens. Amnesty International found that 85% of the rapists were U.S. Citizens. As such, sexual violence against Native Women was not illegal until 2012. There are still a higher rate of rapes happening in Alaska but even Sarah Palin’s Vice-Presidential nomination in 2008 didn’t bring the severity of this crisis to the National News.
Instead, U.S. News Reporters gleefully report on child rapes or gang rapes happening in the Middle East or Asia while ignoring all the sexual violence against women within our own country. The proof is in how the U.S. media conducts itself; they don’t care about the innocent women and young children suffering from violent rapes in our own country. They only focus on foreigners for this self-exaltation and egoism about being superior to other countries. History books in the U.S. never divulge the true extent of Christian genocides or war rapes conducted on Native American Tribes or the fact that violent rapes upon Native Americans continue to be a problem in today’s time. It seems national egoism is more important than rape victims – including children – to the U.S. news media.
The second offender of lawful injustice, and likely of more interest to Americans since it impacts them, is that police don’t have a duty to protect U.S. citizens; regardless of if they’re being robbed, murdered, or raped. A police officer can walk away from you needing assistance because the public duty doctrine only requires police to protect the public at large – if you’re being accosted then the law determines that you’re a private citizen and thus the public duty doctrine isn’t required to protect you. This was decided in the Supreme Court case of Gonzales V. Castle Rock 2005; a woman who had obtained a court issued protected order had no right to protection from the police after she lost her 10, 9, and 8 year old children to her estranged husband who murdered them all through a gunshot wound through the head. The woman, Gonzales, had begged the police for help on three separate occasions and received no help; the next day the husband committed suicide by cop and the police discovered the dead bodies of the children in the trunk of his car. The case moved up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States found that her children had no Constitutional protection despite being U.S. Citizens. That is the Federal law of the civilized, first world, United States of America and is still in effect to this day.