Legal Television Tropes, Part the Second

I really hate television shows about the practice of law.  I may be the only law student who can truthfully say I have never seen a full episode of Law & Order.  Not a single one.  In any of its incarnations.  I think I watched half of an episode once, but two things stuck out to me immediately:

1.  The whole thing was so unrealistic that it was a major turn-off.  The timeline, the political pressures, the investigation, it was all ridiculous.
2. It’s shows like Law & Order that helped make my mother completely overprotective.  Everybody is always getting raped and murdered.  It’s no wonder I had to be home by 10 pm even though I was 20 years old and lived in the world’s tiniest town-without-crime.

So it’s really no wonder that I made it a crusade to avoid legal shows.*  However, I must confess: I have become addicted to NBC’s Harry’s Law.  And I’m sure half of you out there are going, “WHY?”

Okay.  I know the premise is crazy.  Brilliant patent lawyer (Kathy Bates/the titular “Harry”) gets bored with her life and starts smoking pot in her office while watching Looney Tunes.  She then gets fired and has two near death experiences which convince her that she should open up a law office in an abandoned shoe store in the worst part of Cincinnati.  I told you it was far-fetched.

Like most legal shows, it follows a relatively small cast of characters in a “case-of-the-week” context.  There is some bad dialogue.  I think it comes from the usual problem of non-lawyers trying to write witty things about the law and not  quite making it.  Also, I wish Brittany Snow would disappear from the show.  It is set in the Cleveland ghetto.  I wish someone would shoot her.  But that’s not important, because that’s not where the glory of Harry’s Law lies. 

No, the glory of Harry’s Law lies in two things:

1. Kathy Bates delivering dry, sarcastic lines because while she cares deeply about the people around her, she really doesn’t give a damn about their personal problems and has no issues with telling them so.
2.  The presentation of the law itself, from making appropriate objections (which NEVER HAPPENS IN LEGAL SHOWS AND MOVIES AND IT MAKES MY STOMACH TURN), to ethical concerns that most people don’t realize lawyers face every day, to trying to find justice for everybody, not just the white and wealthy.

In a recent episode, “Send in the Clowns,” the show dealt with the idea of public defenders, and how they’re seen as law trash, scum who trick juries into putting criminals back on the street.  But as the “law trash” defense lawyer points out in a great scene, “He could be innocent.  Which is a jury question.  Our job is to fight for the guy.  And if you’re sitting there, suggesting that we fight a little less hard for the ones we think did it, maybe you should save a little of that disgust for yourself.  Ronald Perry deserves best efforts.  They all do.”

And isn’t that the essence of the law?  Everyone deserves due process?  Everyone gets to be innocent until they’re proven guilty?  And then, my favorite part of the show is always Harry’s closing argument that encapsulates the point the episode is trying to make about the law.  It’s always brilliant and heartfelt without being overly preachy.  To make my point: 

“To be honest, when I first got this case, I thought, ‘ick.’  Who wants these kinds of cases anyway?  The facts are ugly, they don’t pay, and when I first saw the defendant, I thought ‘He probably did it.’  I’m sure a few of you think the same.  And the victim, he’s intelligent, clean-cut, upper middle class, certainly no motive to lie, why wouldn’t we believe him?  I mean, he was there, for God’s sake.  If he says it was Ronald Perry, then who the hell are we to doubt him? 

“Well, you have a duty to doubt him.  You took an oath to demand that the prosecution satisfy its burden of proving guilt beyond all reasonable doubt.  And they haven’t done that.  They never found the watch or wallet in my client’s possession, never located a gun, they introduced no physical evidence, no circumstantial evidence, no forensics of any kind.  Just the eyewitness account from a man who clearly had to be in shock.  A man who was able to describe almost nothing about his assailant.  For the gun, you heard the meticulous details; for the suspect, “fat latino.”   That’s it.  Maybe Mr. Layton got it right.  Perhaps it was Ronald Perry...

“What’s the point?  Well, the point is, once you relax those standards, once you say, ‘close enough is good enough,’ seems guilty, lock him up,’ it’s not just the guilty who are at risk, but the innocent.  You.  Me...The State has not satisfied its burden.  It hasn’t even come close.  He has not been proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.  You can’t charge a man, take away his freedom with no physical evidence but one shocky I.D. and call that justice.  You can’t be satisfied with that.  Assuming of course, you care.  Do you?”**

This was a ridiculously long post, thanks to all of the transcription.  But seriously, Harry’s Law is a winner.  And though the season finale premiered Monday, it’s worth catching on summer repeat, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that it gets picked up again next season!

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*I will admit, I watched ABC’s The Deep End while it was on and really enjoyed it.  But that was more like Grey’s with lawyers than it was an actual legal show.  I like watching Lifetime’s Drop Dead Diva for the same reason.  It’s not really a legal procedural, so much as a drama that happens to be about a lawyer.

**You can watch Kathy Bates’s delightful delivery yourself by going to Hulu.com or NBC.com and looking up the episode “Send in the Clowns.”  Her closing starts at about 31 minutes.  It really is worth watching, even if you're not interested in the show, if just to note that the most important thing you can do is capture the jury's attention.