CULTURE
Rapping, Elayne
CULTURE Elayne Rapping Land of Good-Guy Prosecutors My son just finished law school and passed the bar. By all rights, I should be strutting around the neighborhood, regaling friends and...
...they'll give you a sleazeball...
...Criminals are everywhere going free to rob and plunder, while their lying, scheming, amoral attorneys grow richer by the minute...
...you say...
...to which the even more 2lum than usual Hoffman nods assent...
...Simpson is a murdering, misogynist sociopath and a danger, still, to women everywhere...
...There is no pretense whatever to social or political realism on this show...
...Don't even bother to ask for a lawyer...
...And who could blame them...
...But you won't see that point of view on Law and Order, where the only good lawyers are prosecutors...
...It's worth noting—although the show itself does not take note of it—that the entire LAPD springs into action when Hoffman's child disappears because he is a prominent, powerful figure...
...But it's not only—or even primarily— through Court TV and CNN that the media work to befuddle us about the true nature of the criminal-justice system, and whose interests it does and doesn't serve...
...Law and Order has long been one of the classiest shows on the air...
...everything he wants to know, and he'll take care of you...
...He operates in the L.A...
...the harder TV fiction works to counteract it with versions of a much kinder, gentler, and more honest system...
...Ma'am" show, in which cops and lawyers do their jobs, and the writers do their legal homework...
...to keep the streets safe for us upscale viewers of "quality television...
...We don't need to like Randy Weaver or David Ko-resh to be concerned that someone defend their right to be free from invasion by the state...
...But it doesn't happen every week...
...Virtually every courtroom drama presents the most stereotypical images of defense attorneys and their clients...
...There is no sense that the criminal-justice system is indeed a system, or that economic, political, and social forces determine, to a significant extent, what happens to the hapless individuals who find themselves caught in its grip...
...Except that what passes for "liberalism" these days isn't doing much bleeding for the poor and oppressed, even rhetorically...
...White audiences tend to see each case as a little drama of right and wrong, in which "truth" is the issue, punishment the point...
...Of course...
...These are dated, to be sure...
...The media have a lot to do with this...
...And if you are so sure you are safe, how about those new surveillance systems they are starting to put on public streets and shopping centers in your town...
...Nor do most blacks have trouble with the idea—dear to the law and rightly so—that tainted evidence of any kind puts into question all evidence gathered...
...In California, legislation is pending which would deny prisoners the right to speak to the media, lest they sully our ears and eyes with their side of their stories...
...And the question of whether Hoffman's movie-star client—accused of murdering a fifteen-year-old girl in a particularly kinky way involving all manner of drugs, sex...
...He knew nothing about it...
...Even the Timothy McVeighs of the world have rights that it is in our own interests as citizens to protect...
...Guess again...
...Nonetheless, the bias toward the underdog, and against the state, was emphatic...
...Why else would our prisons be bursting at the seams, as the prison industry itself becomes big business...
...Nobody likes a mad rightwing bomber, after all...
...It was his ambitious then-assistant (a woman, no less), who had since gone into private practice as—wouldn't you know it?—a defense attorney...
...Simpson trial...
...Simpson trial and Hard Copy—an L.A...
...No one on either side of the courtroom ever does the right thing, or even thinks about it...
...That is not, however, what the Founding Fathers had in mind...
...Indeed, the two very best shows on the air—Law and Order and Murder One— are both trying to present courtroom drama in a realistic, sophisticated way...
...So things tend to get more complicated in real life than TV would have us believe...
...Hoffman has recently taken to working with the D.A.'s office in an effort to find the person who kidnapped ins daughter...
...The Client, based on the John Grisham novel and movie, and seen at the 8 p.m...
...The tradition of TV courtroom drama in America has been in the liberal, Frank Capra-mode...
...Recently the D.A...
...Most are more likely to look like his victims, the fictionalized black subway riders...
...invariably agonizes over justice and upholds progressive values while the defense attorney is pond scum...
...For Perry Mason, tough cases were the only ones worth taking, because they symbolized what the American legal system stood for: the right of private citizens, no matter how poor or powerless or socially insignificant, to the best possible defense against charges brought by the all-powerful state, as represented by the always slightly sinister D.A...
...To most blacks, there is no doubt about the systemic nature of the law, about its tendency to act in accord with large racial and political principles by which some people get one kind of justice and others get another...
...No, to the Founding Fathers—fresh from a monarchy with nonexistent individual rights— the most important principle of law was that it protect the innocent and the presumed innocent against the state's capacity to oppress and misuse power, not that it punish the guilty...
...Every story here is of individual souls whose problems the system, in the guise of two good-hearted, right-thinking lawyers, will solve...
...will turn cartwheels trying to make sure justice is done and the kid gets a break...
...of the O.J...
...Give me a break...
...They have reason to believe in the principle of •'reasonable doubt" and hang onto it for dear life...
...In his office, the staff attorneys wear buttons that read, "Don't tell my mother I'm a public defender...
...I've come to understand such black humor very well...
...These stereotypes demonize those who defend the accused against the state, while they whitewash the state itself...
...Elayne Rapping, most recently the author of "The Culture of Recovery" (Beacon), appears in this space every other month...
...The attitude of most Americans toward defense attorneys is not good...
...What we have now in the way of serious legal dramas is a whole lot more cynical...
...You see, my son is a public defender...
...We still have a few relics of this corny, old tradition around...
...Even to write these words is to brand myself as a hopelessly out-of-date bleeding-heart liberal...
...After all, the state did violence in those cases—a lot of violence for reasons that never quite added up to my satisfaction...
...And the more CNN and Court TV and the nightly news present evidence to the contrary (what about those Fuhrman tapes...
...Just tell the nice D.A...
...Well, good for him...
...It used to be that the little guy, falsely accused, was proven innocent by a heroic lawyer modeled after Clarence Darrow...
...But the liberal D.A...
...Murder One is a whole different kettle of fish...
...When the prime suspect gets off...
...He wants a stiff sentence, and cares nothing for the defendant's rights this time, because it's his kid...
...Yes, this kind of case does happen sometimes, like in Oklahoma...
...Never mind that in real life, where the Court TV cameras don't go, nine out of ten cases that actually go to trial result in convictions and imprisonment...
...To the public, glued to the TV, things are clearly otherwise...
...Trust me...
...But most defendants don't fit this description...
...The lawyers are willing to say or do anything to get their invariably despicable clients off, while the prosecutors—usually cast regulars to whom we have developed a loyalty—are harried, overworked good guys trying valiantly, against super odds, Elayne Rapping, most recently the author of "The Culture of Recovery" (Beacon), appears in this space every other month...
...whose heart and soul, in the 1996 version, are almost as pure as her own) to find a happy ending for all concerned...
...This is a show in which everyone is awful, but some are more awful than others...
...But don't worry...
...The presumption of innocence," so dear to the hearts of the Founding Fathers, seems harder and harder for people to grasp...
...Mason's defendants were always innocent—as innocent as the times themselves...
...actually gets to say to him...
...Both are alarmingly reactionary, for they feed the current rightwing stereotypes about crime, criminals, and the legal system...
...hero was accused of planting evidence to win a case...
...By all rights, I should be strutting around the neighborhood, regaling friends and strangers with proud tales of "my son, the lawyer...
...didn't let him get away with it...
...She never appears in court to try cases...
...But forget common sense and hard figures...
...On one recent episode, a white, rightwing, militia-type bomber killed a subway earful of African Americans in the Bronx...
...But the show's cynicism doesn't end there...
...It was not always thus...
...The biggest TV drama of all time, of course, was the O.J...
...All the vicious racists and sexists on Law and Order just happen to be defendants, not cops or prosecutors...
...It's easy to give the impression that all prosecutors and cops are decent guys out to serve justice when you have defense attorneys representing rightwing fascists...
...Everyone on this show is guilty of something—usually something awful...
...Everywhere, we hear cries—from the right and what passes for the left on TV—for more prisons, more executions, fewer rights and privileges for "criminals," three-strike laws, and stiffer sentences even for children, whom we are now trying as adults in many places, although most have never had the chance to be children...
...It carefully presents social issues—straight out of yesterday's headlines— and refuses to titillate audiences with the personal or sexual dalliances of its principals...
...Well, we all know that prosecutors never plant evidence, or look the other way when their police-witnesses do so...
...They know how things work...
...she runs around finding solutions to her clients' personal problems and then sits down over coffee and croissants with her old friend the D.A...
...But The Client is a relic of an earlier, more innocent time, watched mostly by an aging demographic: people who remember Frank Capra and miss him...
...and perversion—did it or not is irrelevant...
...This doesn't happen in South Central, but then there is no South Centra] in this L.A., so what does it matter...
...Simpson, Lorena Bobbin—go free...
...you see...
...the D.A...
...But they are worth looking at on occasion to get a sense of how different were the assumptions about the police, prosecutors, and defendants in those days...
...Now you see how we feel...
...It's actually fictional programs that give TV audiences the most dramatically distorted images of American law and lawyers...
...And everyone is filthy rich, very white, and if not powerful, then at least famous and/or gorgeous...
...An eye for an eye" resonates deeply with public emotion these days...
...The problem is that it presents every single issue from the point of view of the police and prosecutors, and then—to add insult to injury—puts a liberal spin on the package so that the D.A...
...He got a conviction and struck a blow for racial justice...
...Clarence Darrow, much less Bill Kunstler, would have as bleak a chance of getting elected to public office in the current climate as Charles Manson...
...rarely utters the phrase "presumption of innocence" unless it's with a sorrowful, but chillingly cynical look...
...If you get arrested on television, you'll be in good hands...
...It's an updated "Just the facts...
...TV bombards us daily with images of slick defense attorneys using their wily ways to bamboozle unsuspecting jurors into letting "obviously guilty" persons—the Menen-dez brothers, O.J...
...stretching, more or less, from Brentwood to Melrose Place, but conveniently excluding South Central and any of the other twenty-some ethnic communities that make up the bulk of the city's population...
...That would be wrong," as Richard Nixon famously put it...
...They are so well done, so smart, so beautifully produced and acted, so respectful of viewers' intellects and attention spans...
...This is the land of Kato Kaelin, Faye Resnick, and Dominick Dunne, not Rodney King...
...When Law and Order presents a more typical case—a young black male accused of drug dealing, for instance—you can be sure that it's the defense attorney who will be sleazy or incompetent, while the D.A...
...Raymond Burr, first as Perry Mason and then as Ironsides, still shows up in reruns...
...His attorney used every racist argument in the book to persuade the white, suburban jury that his client was a victim of anti-white-male "political correctness...
...I confess to a love/hate relationship with both these shows...
...In fact, it happens about as often as famous football celebrities are accused of killing their wives, or Beverly Hills kids kill their parents, or women cut off their husbands' penises...
...This spectacle gave proof of how much we, as a society, are under the sway of these media images and stereotypes about criminal justice...
...Turned out, however, that he hadn't done it...
...family-viewing" hour, features a warm-hearted, decent female attorney who usually takes victimized kids and women for clients...
...But that most white Americans seem to have been outraged by the verdict, while most blacks seemed gratified, strikes me as very much connected to the different views of criminal justice that the two groups have...
...I have no doubt—for what it's worth—that O.J...
...The problem is that our heroine, Reggie Love, is more social worker than attorney...
...Teddy Hoffman, the defense attorney-to-the-stars...
...she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse...
Vol. 60 • May 1996 • No. 5
