TV Reviews : ‘Criminal Justice’ Unveils Court Siege

If you have any vestiges of faith in the court system, you’ll be sobered and numbed by “Criminal Justice” (HBO cable tonight at 9).

The production is a penetrating, boiler room, jailhouse story and an incisive directing debut by writer Andy Wolk. But the ultimate wallop is thematic: the deal-making among lawyers, defendants and the bench that makes plea bargaining more urgent than the primary issue of guilt or innocence.

The opening bloody scene in a crack house in Brooklyn is dispatched with staccato voltage. A cocaine-addicted hooker (a scabrous performance by Rosie Perez) is robbed and slashed across her face with a knife. A suspect, an ex-con (Forest Whitaker), is picked up outside his Brooklyn home after the woman fingers him from a police photo file.

The only evidence is the victim’s word against his. But it’s enough to plunge the confused/defiant young man into a six-month agony of hearings and lockups as the legal game-playing unfolds between his prosecutor (Jennifer Grey) and a legal aid lawyer (Anthony La Paglia).

Expediency rules. The suspect is no dummy (Whitaker is wonderful in the role), but he’s squeezed by the machinery of the besieged courts to reject a trial and go for a plea bargain--for shorter time in return for admitting guilt.

The production avoids stereotyping. This Gotham breakdown is all too human. At one point a judge boasts of his record-tally of cases as if he were reading a quarterly statement. At the end, a mesmerizing fade out, La Paglia’s earnest public defender says, “We all cut a deal.”

The script clearly signals the defendant’s innocence, but what fascinates is the clanging pace of the narrative and the clattering in the legal trenches. The neo-realism is impersonal and hard as a cue ball.

As a footnote, and perhaps intentionally, HBO Sunday night (see accompanying review of “Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture”) dramatizes another judicial nightmare. But “Criminal Justice” is the achievement that shines.