Written by Ardor
"Don't say you rely on someone else's conscience to fight a lawsuit."
"I rely on my conscience."
"You think the jury is all wise and wise?" They just want to go home and watch cable TV every day, and they don't care about your truth and justice. ”
"They're human."
1
In the movie "Runaway Jury", the dialogue between the defendant's legal counsel, Lan Jin, and the plaintiff's lawyer Wen Dao in the bathroom is a classic.
Runaway Jury is a film about the jury system and gun control.
One morning two years ago, a securities company was shot and eleven people were killed. The perpetrator is an employee who is dismissed by the company, takes revenge on his colleagues, and then commits suicide by drinking bullets.
Two years later, the wife of one of the victims took the gun manufacturer to court.
A jury is selected before the trial of the case. The jury consists of 12 people, drawn from among those who are called upon by the court. Under the auspices of the judge, the lawyers of both sides each choose half of their own quotas, and if the other party has no objection, it will be approved.
The selection of a jury is crucial, and it is almost a matter of success or failure. Therefore, the lawyer goes to great lengths to select the jury, conducts psychological activity analysis according to the candidate's life experience, physical characteristics, body language, etc., and selects people who are in their favor to join the team that determines their victory or defeat as much as possible.
Someone once left a message after my article and asked:
The jury doesn't understand the law?
Yes, juries are not required to understand the law. In fact, many times they not only do not understand the law, but also do not have the cultural quality. As Blue Gold says in this movie,
Most of them are debtors. They are willing to participate in the jury, in large part for the income of 16 yuan a day.
People with better cultural qualities and higher incomes often want to evade jury obligations, which is actually very annoying to judges. The male protagonist in the film, a video game businessman named Nick, used this psychology of the judge to blend into the jury.
The more he stated that he did not want to participate and wanted to make money, the more the judge had the intention that he should participate. Lawyers on both sides had no objections, and he became Juror No. 9.
He had a purpose and his and girlfriend Mary aimed to get $15 million from this case.
The specific operation is that he manipulates the jury, and Mary negotiates a deal with the lawyers of the original defendants outside, and whoever pays fifteen million will let whoever wins the case.
Of course, she also told the plaintiff's lawyer that she sympathized with the deceased and that if the same amount were the same amount, she would let the plaintiff win. A war over the jury took shape.
2
In the United States, the plaintiffs have not won such cases related to guns.
Wen Dao is a lawyer with a sense of justice, and he represents the case with the intention of changing the law.
The United States is a case law country, and as long as this case is won, similar cases will be won in the future. In this way, gun manufacturers will inevitably fall, and gun control will not be a problem.
Realizing this, Wen Dao was also very impressed with Mary's "business" for a while. But his law firm couldn't come up with the money.
Blue Gold is of course more aware of the seriousness of the problem, and once it loses, there will be a domino effect. He is a veteran of such cases and knows how to deal with them.
He has a team dedicated to juries, threatening and inducing jurors and plaintiff witnesses according to different circumstances. But in the end, because of Nick's "troublemaking", he still had to give in, and the account he left for them was remitted to 15 million.
In the jury room, Nick receives a message from Mary that the money has been credited.
He began to speak, speaking for the plaintiffs.
Nick was a very clever young man, and we know that he had entered the jury in an attempt to get away with it.
At the jury's first lunch, he asked Mary to trick the crowd outside and make the delivery late. When everyone was hungry, he went into the restaurant to find the judge who was eating, and in order not to delay the trial, the judge arranged a big meal.
The jury was poor, and Nick bought a lot of hearts with one meal. He also played tricks on his heart, squeezing away some disobedient jurors and replacing them with alternates. In this way, he had enough influence on the jury to decide the outcome of the case.
At one point, Blue Gold hated him to the bone, turned his home upside down, and set it on fire. At the last moment, I had to bow my head.
In the end, the plaintiff won the lawsuit, and the amount of compensation exceeded 100 million.
The court exclaimed, the plaintiff wept with joy, and Nick's eyes were damp.
3
It turns out that Mary's sister, who is also a good friend of Nick's, died in a college shooting ten years ago.
A boy with a gun fired wildly, and 9 young children died on campus.
The case went to court, the defendant's lawyer, Lan Jin, mischief in the jury, and the plaintiff lost.
The loss of their dearest loved ones, the heavy lessons of the case, have led them to persistently follow a path - tracking gun cases, influencing the jury, and changing the law.
They have been tempered several times in the past ten years. With this case, they want to teach Blue Gold a lesson, and more importantly, they must achieve the purpose of gun control. They are like lone soldiers, desperate for the sake of ideals.
After The blue gold remittance was completed, he also received a message from the subordinates from Mary's hometown: don't send money, this is a conspiracy. However, it was too late, not only was the case lost, but because of the receipt voucher, Blue Gold would no longer be able to become a lawyer.
As for the $15 million, Nick and Mary will give it to the families who have been victimized in their hometowns.
On the street, the plaintiff's lawyer, Wen Dao, saw Nick and Mary in the distance, and across the road, they showed him a pure smile.
At that moment, Wen Dao understood that they were not doing two-way business, they were talking to him about money, but they were confusing Blue Gold's eyes and ears.
They were comrades-in-arms, and they won.
4
Runaway Jury is a film directed by Gary Fred and based on John Grisham's novel of the same name, released in the United States in October 2003.
The suspense of the story falls out, whether it is the jury or about gun control, and the ending is satisfactory.
However, the reality is not so rosy, and in fact gun control is an unresolved problem in the United States.
The reality is even harsher than the case in the movie. On February 14, 2018, a shooting at a high school in Florida, USA, killed at least 17 people.
In the aftermath of the Florida shootings, school students and parents took to the streets to rally and demand that lawmakers amend gun laws.
However, the state's House of Representatives voted down the ban on offensive weapons and high-capacity magazines on the 20th.
Gun control is against the interests of the U.S. gun companies consortium, and the politicians behind these consortiums will not support it.
In reality, juries are also increasingly questioned.
In the movie, the judge's sentence points out the necessity of the existence of the jury: the previous judge was very powerful, and whoever did not like it would be sentenced to death.
In the movie, the plaintiff's lawyer, Wen Dao, believes in the jury, saying: They are people. He believed in human nature.
In the movie, Nick also said: I don't sway them, only to prevent you from cheating, we let them vote with conscience. He believes in conscience.
However, neither human nature nor conscience is so reliable. People have weaknesses.
Because the quality is too low, the jury is becoming less and less applicable to trial, which is an indisputable fact. Especially after the Simpson wife murder case, more and more people of insight issued calls to cancel the jury.
5
The film is like an anti-language, the story and reality seem to be so big gap, the ending is almost opposite, but it is full of hope.
It is also in this seemingly inadvertent reverse narrative that it brings the core of two issues to the table:
First, the jury is manipulated, which is a problem that cannot but be confronted.
Whether it is for justice as Nick or for the sake of self-interest as Blue Gold, it will certainly make this kind of judgment lose its meaning and value. In the real world, there are cases where the parties do not know about the manipulation of the jury simply because they do not want an invalid trial.
Second, to achieve gun control, we can only make the gun problem a problem for gun producers.
This is a reminder and an appeal to the American people and to the American judiciary.
For Americans, these changes have a long way to go. However, in terms of the main tone of the film, they are full of confidence, because they still believe in the law and they also believe in conscience.