The banality of criminality: Forget Hollywood. Courts are boring and run on fact
The events of the past few weeks, starting with Donald Trump’s conviction on felony counts of doctoring his business records and ending a few days ago with Hunter Biden’s conviction for violation of the gun laws, have spawned a series of sordid and alarming claims from all sides – chiefly from the media and those who wish to manipulate it to their own ends.
But there is a normalized way to look at all this, and I’m afraid that’s simply not getting the press it needs.
Every spring, with the amazing assistance and aid of the 10th Judicial Circuit of Florida, I go with my students on a series of field trips called “practicum.” The idea is that students who are interested in the law – either in academic ways or in ways signal to their future careers – should have a chance to take a look and see the system at work. Literally, what it looks like when it gets out of bed in the morning through when it shuts down for the day. It’s a first-year class, and most of the students are encountering lawyers, courtrooms, plaintiffs, judges, defendants, prosecutors and police and sheriff’s deputies for the first time.
The first time “in real life,” that is.
They are all closet experts on the law, as are we all, since we all have learned how the judiciary works from TV drama, “true crime,” internet podcasts and salacious beach books. We all know how it works: The main players are crooked politicians manipulating the system, rotten cops (usually “on the take”), innocent victims being sent away for things they did not d,; creeps getting away with murder and worse.
A fiction, of course. But a stubborn one.
We prep the students with speakers all semester, who often play the role of “myth buster.” One year, we even contemplated a panel of practitioners (cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys) who would go through an episode of “Law and Order” and stop it every time a factual error was made – but a quick run-through showed us we’d never finish the episode. It would have been a 2-hour class stopping every 2 minutes for long explanations of evidence, procedure, judicial action and proper police practice.
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I’m not one to bust the stories – they’re sometimes great tales and some of them even vaguely follow a kind of logic. But the problem with these narratives is that they are just that: They are alarming not because they happen all the time, but because they almost never happen. They’re fiction. They are born out of the minds of Hollywood.
When the students go through practicum, the bus ride home is never a quiet one – excited voices running through what they’ve seen – peppered constantly with “I never knew it worked like that” or, simply, “I was surprised” and often, “some of it was pretty boring.”
It can be. The Judicial system is not a place of entertainment. By the time it hits the courtroom, criminality in the U.S. is a pretty mundane affair. The system is totally dominated by judges and lawyers and cops who know their business, who act well within the confines of the sharp parameters of the law and the rules of procedure. Cops who know their profession – we have one of the best-trained county sheriff’s outfits in the country. And surprise: They’re honest, thorough, truthful investigators. I’ve no reason to believe it’s any different elsewhere.
The fictionalization of the American judicial system has created an imaginary world.
They’ve created a world in which the president of the United States directs massively disconnected state forces to punish and harass his enemies; one in which drug addicts with guns run free because of their political connections, where innocence – and guilt – are determined by weird conspiracy forces. … It’d make for a great movie, but it has no concrete relationship with reality.
Donald Trump or Hunter Biden. It actually is what it is.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.