New television show explodes myths "In Justice" dramatizes reality of US
criminal justice system By Debra Watson
22 February 2006

"In Justice"—ABC Television, Fridays, 9 p.m. Eastern

It is remarkable that ABC's new mid-season drama "In Justice" is on
television at all. By virtue of its underlying premise, that many innocent
people are in prison as the result of official malfeasance, the program is
at odds with every police drama on US television today.

Until "In Justice" debuted on New Year's Day 2006, the glorification of the
draconian law-and-order culture in the US was virtually the only approach
available on network television. In the detective and police dramas that
litter nightly prime time schedules, hardened cops, clever detectives and
stern courts and prosecutors work unfailingly to bring in the guilty and
mete out severe punishment to society's criminal element. The exceptional
episode may point to an injustice or express some ambiguity toward the
status quo, but by and large the form of most widely accessible popular
entertainment has given the existing justice system a blanket endorsement.

In the new program, the clients of the National Justice Project, a fictional
law office, are innocent people who have languished in prison for years, and
on "In Justice" it is the police, judges, prosecutors and politicians who
are guilty of negligence, fraud and even murder. Thus, instead of
encouraging trust in US criminal justice institutions, this program helps to
educate its viewers in its endemic failures.

The figures on incarceration in the US are staggering. The only response of
the powers that be to the intractable social crisis is repression, the
vindictive desire for punishment and retribution. The US currently has the
largest prison population in the world, both in percentage of its population
and in sheer numbers of people kept behind bars. The overall US
incarceration rate—724 per 100,000—is 25 percent higher than that of any
other nation in the world, despite declining crime rates.

More than 1,000 people have been executed in the United States since the
reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. The vast majority of advanced
industrialized countries have long outlawed the grisly practice. A total of
57 people were put to death in the US in 2005 alone.

*Freeing the innocent*

Each episode of "In Justice" begins with a flashback of a crime as the
convicting jury conceived of it. In the course of the show, the assumptions
of the jury are decisively disproved as the lawyers and private detectives
at the National Justice Project pursue their case. The fictional lawyers and
detectives that populate the series often quote real-life legal precedents
that prejudiced their client's initial defense.

On American television in a sample February week, 6 out of the 20 top
programs were crime shows that glorify the institutions of the criminal
justice system. The second-most popular show on TV, the crime drama "CSI:
Crime Scene Investigation,"* *is now in its sixth season.* *Around one in
four members of the viewing public, or 27 million people, tune in to "CSI"
during Thursday night prime time.

In that show, and its more recent clones "CSI Miami," "CSI New York" and
"NCIS," criminals are often rounded up with amazing speed and accuracy as
the science of modern forensics deftly solves the most perplexing crimes and
the guilty line up to receive their just punishment.

The "In Justice" writers, which include executive producers Robert King and
Michelle King, consistently produce scripts that demonstrate they have no
fear in excoriating the rich and powerful.

They often make into villains the social types that the other police dramas
present as self-sacrificing heroes. In the initial episodes of the series,
we have seen a top FBI official led off in handcuffs, a prosecutor admitting
to illegally coaching witnesses to get a homicide conviction and a
lawyer/politician attempting to cut a deal to cover up his firm's criminal
activity.

The program has offered us lying witnesses, incompetent "experts" and
federal law-enforcement officials willing to send innocent men to life in
prison in pursuit of their law-and-order agenda. Cops interrogate children
in the most brutal fashion so they can get false confessions and wrap up
their cases.

*US social reality and prime time television*

With this upside-down, or rather right-side-up, reality on display, "In
Justice" continues to garner respectable ratings since its prime-time debut.
About one in six of all Friday-night television viewers watch the show. And
there is reason for this apparent popularity. This program presents a grim
reality noted more and more in everyday life. It appears the producers have
hit a social nerve with the series.

Just weeks after an episode centering on a false murder confession elicited
from a child by aggressive cops, the Detroit newspapers carried an account
of two youths who were barely spared prison for life, victims of similar
circumstances. Citing the upcoming sentencing of the real killers for a 2000
murder case, *Detroit Free Press* columnist Brian Dickerson said that the
innocent Michigan boys had always claimed the false confessions were made
under police duress.

A 2001 effort to enact a measure forcing police to videotape their
interrogations has been shelved despite continued uproar over the incident.
Dickerson points out that in the original trial, New Baltimore, Michigan,
judge Paul Cassidy refused to throw out the boys' false statements and
stated from the bench that the two were clearly guilty.

Kyle MacLachlan of "Twin Peaks" and *Blue Velvet* fame stars in "In
Justice." He plays the flamboyant attorney David Swain. He finances and
heads up the crusading National Justice Project, dedicated to freeing the
innocent, abandoning his former lucrative law career.

Irish-born actor Jason O'Mara plays Charles Conti, a troubled former cop. He
works for Swain as penance for the suicide of a man wrongly locked up as the
result of Conti's own harsh interrogation while working as a policeman in
California.

Conti oversees the office of interns and private detectives including
Brianna, played by Constance Zimmer; Jon, played by Daniel Cosgrove; and
Sonya Quintano, played by Marisol Nichols. Their reasons for pursuing
careers in the project are grist for subplots in the show.

*Death penalty drama*

Last Friday's episode was* *a gripping and emotionally charged portrayal of
an innocent man's final week on death row. From start to finish, the story
was an attack on the death penalty, and on the callous disregard for human
rights that surrounds this morally reprehensible action by the state.

Less than an hour before the black inmate is set to be executed at San
Quentin, the private detectives prove the homeless man was framed by a local
parish church official. The pillar of the community killed the parish priest
in order to cover up his own habitual wife-beating. The church official had
been behind the frame-up of the Project's client.

Coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, just this week San Quentin prison
was the scene of a major controversy over the death penalty as two
anesthesiologists refused to participate in the execution of 46-year-old
Michael Morales. A judge ordered the prison to have an anesthesiologist (and
a backup) on hand to "minimize" Morales's pain as he was put to death by
lethal injection. The two doctors, in a statement, declared, "Any such
intervention would clearly be medically unethical. As a result, we have
withdrawn from participation in this current process." The American Medical
Association, the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the California
Medical Association all opposed the anesthesiologists' participation as
unethical and unprofessional.

The death penalty dramas on "In Justice" are taken from the headlines. In
January 2000, then-governor of Illinois George Ryan, a Republican elected in
1998 as a supporter of capital punishment, commuted or reduced the sentences
of 167 death row prisoners and pardoned another four outright.

In a speech delivered at Northwestern University that year, he attacked the
state's criminal justice system in scathing terms. He detailed a process of
arbitrary prosecutions, concocted evidence, false testimony from prison
"snitches" and confessions coerced by the police truncheon and other
barbaric methods. "The Illinois capital punishment system is broken," he
declared.

Although the program contains a disclaimer stating "this program is not
meant to reference any actual event or person," the fictional National
Justice Project is apparently a composite of various efforts by groups
fighting for justice for the incarcerated.

Students and faculty at Northwestern University staff the Center on Wrongful
Convictions in Illinois. The center's investigations exonerating 17 Illinois
death row prisoners were part of the series of events that led up to Ryan's
shocking 2000 revelations.

According to the online *Truth "In Justice" Newsletter*, since 1989, in
California alone, at least 200 inmates have been released from prison after
courts found that they had been unjustly convicted. The Innocence Project,
founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in 1992 (and the subject of a
recent documentary, *After Innocence*, directed by Jessica Sanders), with
branches in various states and cities, claims to have won the release of
more than 150 wrongfully accused prisoners through the use of DNA testing.
Dramatizing all their stories could keep "In Justice" on the air for a very
long time.

The complexities and implications of the acute class and social tensions in
the US are rarely seen or portrayed on US television, much less taken
seriously. The new show "In Justice" indicates that such questions are
increasingly front and center in many minds. Encouraging a serious
examination of this aspect of US social relations opens a window to broader
realities that are currently obscured.

Behind the climate of law and order in the US, intensified to grotesque
proportions over the past 20 years, lies a blunt social reality. The
millions flowing to society's "winners" must come from grinding down (and
keeping down!) the "losers." The unprecedented and shocking social
inequality of modern American society can only be maintained by increased
repression at home and abroad, and this means maintaining one of the most
repressive justice systems in the world.

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