When talking about criminal law films and the way court systems are portrayed in the media, I always tend to dose off and think "ugh, court systems, yada, yada, yada lets get this over with." However, the dynamic of how court systems are portrayed in contemporary films is not so much centered on the trials themselves anymore, but they focus largely on the actions of the lawyers outside of the court.
In The Rainmaker, Matt Damon's character, Rudy Baylor, just graduated from law school and takes his bar exam while working at small firm that isn't doing so hot. He takes on a case of a couple whose insurance company is denying requests that will help pay for their son's operation which will save his life. Rudy learns of the schemes run by corporate insurance agencies to rip people out of their money, and he fights to take them down and serve justice to the couple whose son (spoiler alert) had died because he was denied the operation.
Now, I may be a little biased because any movie or show Matt Damon is in I automatically think it is amazing, but this criminal law film based off the book of John Grisham does a good job of making the court system complex and passionate. Obviously the lawyers get away with somethings that they would not be able to get away with in the real world (like when they stage the contact of a jury member in order to play the defense attorney against himself by removing a member who could potentially go against the prosecuting case).
In class we talked about the three modes of media trials: abuse of power, cases illustrating the sinfully rich, and cases involving a kind of evil stranger. The Rainmaker falls into the categories of abuse of power and illustrating the sinfully rich. The insurance company holds the power with ability to deny customers what they need, but they are also making tons of money off of people who are less fortunate. Insurance companies are a different kind of authority figure abusing trial than we would usually assume, but they are known form abusing the power they have from instances in the past.
This is the case in which Rudy works towards providing justice to this couple who loses their son because of the insurance company's schemes and cheating people of their money. He works to expose the insurance company of fraud and essentially allowing the couple's son to die.
The biggest aspect of this movie is the battle between the young, inexperienced lawyer and the experience lawyer who has a reputation for winning many, if not all, of his cases.
Leo Drummond, the defense attorney for the insurance company, is a lying scheming lawyer who goes through any means to make sure his client wins the case, whereas Rudy is concerned mostly with being honest and forthright in his cases. This launches the central conflict of ethical issues within the practice of law and the in the court systems in general. I feel like this type of representation does not reflect on the nature of the court systems and lawyers today, but the devious evil defense lawyer is a popular character type in these criminal law films. Never-the-less, there is an interesting conflict that is presented with the ethical issues that arise in the criminal justice system.
Another interesting aspect of the show is that an almost equally corrupt judge as Drummond is a lawyer who wants to call the trial off because he doesn't think Rudy can make a could case, gets replaced with a more sympathetic judge who is willing to let the trial commence. This example of corrupt judges botching the trial before it even commences is another one of the ethical problems that are being displayed in the court systems.
In the end, Rudy wins the case, but the insurance company declared themselves bankrupt so they can't pay the fifty million dollars of punitive damages. This is still a great success for Rudy, but he decides rather than continuing in his career as a lawyer, we would teach law to students and focus on the ethical behavior of lawyers instead.
So in the end the central conflict is the ethical principles of the court systems and how this is portrayed in the media. With the abundances of criminal law films and shows that portray these unethical court scenarios, one can conclude that people have a lack of trust in the court systems and the criminal justice system as a whole because lawyers and judges can behave unethically. However, I don't think this correlates with the way the court system actually works in our society- it is just how the media chooses to portray it because of the few large cases where the people felt there was injustice (perhaps the OJ Simpson case as an example).
In any case, it is important to examine the ethics of the criminal justice system and the people who work within it.
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