Having an Intrest in detective novels, Errol Moris an american documentary filmamker created the film A Thin Blue Line . I believe his attention in someone who was wrongfully accused of muder brought out a good outcome for the accused , david harris . From 3 witness testimonies a man was being put to death . Discrediting all the testimonies without stating anything about them, morris let the audience decide how credible these witnesses really were. He also brought awareness without being bias on the ideology of police man . There way of thinking and purposely leaving out obvious irregularities in the statement of the partner of the killed policeman led to a wrong conclusion of david harris. I think he was trying to show the carelessness of the value of someones life.The actions of the people blaming Harris for the murder went against his rights of innocent until PROVEN guilty.The film was enjoyed on my behalf and persuaded me to want to see more of errol morris’s films.
Hi Jaddary, I enjoyed reading your post on “The Thin Blue Line”. I think out of all the film we’ve watched in class this might have been the one that I had the strongest feelings about. Apart from the case having so many inconsistent and unreliable leads, I was enraged by the way they demeaned women. At one point during the film I had to stop and write things that were said negatively about women. There was a part where one of the incompetent investigators said, “she didn’t even follow protocol, you’d expect a policeMAN to do a better job than she did”, in her defense it was their first night on patrol, her partner was wounded, she was in shock. Did she follow protocol? No. But does that make her less of a cop? They weren’t any better by pinning a crime on an innocent man. Also, when the female lawyer said that she knew he wasn’t guilty and she had solid ways of proving it but she “didn’t want to look stupid”. How sexist can a county be that it stop a well educated women from standing up?
I agree with both of you on this particular film. In the beginning, they did question her as if it was all of fault on why her partner died. with the way the events were reenacted, morris tried to use his best imagination by recreating scenes and even then, it showed how messy this whole story was. I did like how he had the actual detectives included in his film, it felt as if you could have a better insight on how they were as an individual during this case. When David said detective Gus pulled a gun on him, with the next scene showing the actual detective Gus, you could tell by with his attitude and demeanor that it could’ve been possible he did pull that gun out. they violated David’s rights, seeing as he told them the story and not once did they have a lawyer present. This film makes me wonder if any more wrongly convicted victims can be set free if everything was portrayed in such a way as this film did. I’m not sure if you both would be interested, but, there’s a film on Netflix called “The seven five”, which is about the corruption in the precinct here in New York. I have yet to watch it but I’ve heard from plenty that this film was amazing.
I agree with you on this. This film really showed the flaws of the justice system. With three unreliable witness testimonies, and the officer who was present during the crime changing her story twice making it obvious that her story was fake, they still sentenced an innocent man to death. Even with all the proof in front of them, they still allowed their personal bias from allowing them to do their job. Morris really did do a good job in his film in showing that they didn’t sentence him because they thought he was guilty, they sentenced him just because they wanted someone to be guilty.