‘Devil’s Advocate’: A Crime Against Our Legal System

As a writer who is also an attorney, I am concerned with the apparent trend to go beyond the bashing of lawyers to the wholesale bashing of our legal system in favor of criminal activity and vigilantism.

First there was “Money Train,” a lightweight action flick that asked us to root for the successful theft of a trainful of receipts of the New York City subway system, a theft of public money “justified” by the portrayal of the official in charge of the money train as an authoritarian jerk. Please.

Then there was the murder in “A Time to Kill.” Is the justifiably angry father also justified in taking the law into his own hands to murder the man who raped his child? How is that different from a vigilante lynch mob?

Now we have “The Devil’s Advocate,” in which we are told that lawyers who defend guilty clients are literally doing Satan’s work.

Keanu Reeves plays a criminal defense attorney who has an uncanny knack for picking sympathetic jurors. The turning point in his career, leading to his selection by Al Pacino’s Devil for bigger and better trials in Sin City, New York, is his successful defense of a teacher accused of groping a teenage student after class.

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During the victim’s testimony describing the grope, Reeves observes his client making salacious finger movements, which tells us and Keanu that the defendant is a pervert and thus is probably guilty. How shocking! The movie seems to believe that Reeves should quit on his client. Instead, he chooses what the filmmakers apparently believe is an “immoral” path: to vigorously defend his client.

Reeves does what any good attorney must do: He cross-examines the alleged victim, exercising his client’s constitutional right to confront the witness against him. He finds out that the so-called victim is not only a liar and has lied to the police about other alleged student “victims” but also has a history of animosity toward this particular teacher. The jury finds reasonable doubt and acquits.

I need not remind you civil libertarians out there that this is our system working, not failing. Our system is purposely skewed so that, as Sir William Blackstone said, it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

And it’s not the defense lawyer’s job to judge his own client. That’s the jury’s job.

But the filmmakers believe otherwise; it’s the Devil’s plan to create chaos through acquittal after acquittal, with the lawyers (presumed to omnisciently “know” that their clients are guilty) as the evil instrument.

By failing to distinguish between an appropriate acquittal of a probably guilty defendant when the prosecution has simply failed to meet its burden of proof and a wrongful acquittal obtained by the testimony of a witness Reeves knows to be perjuring herself, the filmmakers do us and the system a disservice.

They offer us no suggestion for a substitute system, other than lawyers quitting cases wholesale at the first hint that their clients might have done something criminal.

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At a time when new democracies around the world are emulating American justice, incorporating the presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury into new constitutions, it’s an irony that Hollywood prefers to encourage judgments that trash the very system that has served us so well.

It’s immoral filmmaking, and it violates our obligation as screenwriters to present a world with rules that we are willing to fight for.

Roger Lowenstein is a television writer who most recently was executive story consultant for “Fast Track” on Showtime and also has written for “L.A. Law” and “Reasonable Doubts.”