DMD essay1 y3 - Theorising Documentary

Subject: Video – The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris
USA/UK/1988/Colour/97 Minutes
BFIV085

I have watched the Thin Blue Line documentary a number of times and I can applaud Errol Morris’s [EM] non-fiction feature delivery, it truly is an exceptional piece of work. I will argue however that Morris created this movie with a legal mind-set and although Morris has been congratulated and praised for being fundamental in the uncovering of a police cover-up and the subsequent freeing of an innocent man, in time certain aspects of the Adams case would have come to light. History has a way of bringing such things out into the open. I am not in any way detracting from the celebration of Morris’ superb investigation; he has expertly used his deductive skills to pursue the truth in this case. Of course, what makes this case different from any other investigation is that Morris chose to perform the detection, undoubtedly following his usual modus operandi and present it through the medium of a movie. I formerly worked as a private detective (agency) from 1988 till 1995 and I find this study into Morris somewhat reflective. I am aware of my previous experiences and how they have moulded me and made me process information and create meaning in most things I do.

The Thin Blue Line is presented in a classic linear fashion. The film starts with the protagonist’ establishment and their association with the story - there is a summary of the entire plot. The next section of the film explores the arrest and police inquiry, moving into Randall Adams’ version of the night in question. The defence argument is created and then the inconsistencies in the case are highlighted. The prosecution witnesses are then introduced, followed by the conviction of Adams. The film then moves from the psychiatric reports into the appeal section. The final stages of the movie follow the aftermath of the trials and are concluded with a retrospective look at the case and the final tape recording of David Harris’ confession. [See Appendix: A for full plot outline.]

The narrative construction of the movie is not that far removed from an actual legal trial. It is presented in a similar fashion, with the notable absence of legal council. The jury is present in the form of the film’s audience and Morris freely allows the witnesses, police officers and attorneys’ give their argument and version. This is where the phrase ‘legal narrative’ could effectively be attributed to the movie text.

The Thin Blue Line recounts the arrest of Randall Adams, his conviction, and subsequent death sentence (which was later reduced to life imprisonment) for the murder of a Dallas policeman, Robert Wood.

The historical element - shortly after midnight on November 28, 1976, Officer Wood and his patrol partner, Officer Teresa Turko, stopped a car being driven without headlights. Officer Wood walked up to the driver’s side of the vehicle and five gun shots were fired from inside the car, killing the officer. The car escaped into the darkness under a hail of Officer Turko’s bullets. Randall Adams was on a stopover in Dallas with his brother, they were on their way to California from Ohio. Adams had found a job in Dallas as a semiskilled labourer and had been working there for six weeks. He was arrested in late December by the Dallas police acting on information provided by Vidor detective Sam Kittrell. Officer Kittrell had learned that David Harris, at the time a sixteen-year-old on probation for other serious criminal charges, had been bragging to his friends in Vidor that he had shot a Dallas policeman. Officer Kittrell questioned Harris on the Dallas murder and Harris facing prosecution for the murder, accused Randall Adams; in exchange for prosecution immunity for the murder of Officer Woods and the other charges pending in Vidor. In court, Harris testified that he slumped down in the passenger seat of the car, when Officer Woods approached the car and as a result he had witnessed the murder being committed by Adams. Randall Adams was then convicted and sentenced to death. Throughout the film Adams protests his innocence, insisting that David Harris had dropped him off at his motel two or three hours before the shooting took place. In the movie’s closing scene, a camera shot of Errol Morris’ audiotape recorder is seen, playing back a taped telephone conversation between Harris and Morris, in which Harris virtually confesses to the crime [see Appendix: B - for full account]. When the film was released in 1988, Randall Adams was in prison in Eastham Unit, Lovelady, Texas, following the American Supreme Court’s overturning of his death sentence in 1980, which then on the recommendation of the Dallas County District Attorney was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment by the governor of Texas. David Harris was on death row in Ellis Unit, Huntsville, Texas (where he remains to this day) for the death by shooting of Mark Walter Mays.

The Thin Blue Line is widely credited with the freeing of an innocent man – Randall Adams received a hearing in 1989 that reversed the original conviction and ordered his release from prison after almost thirteen years’ immurement. The success of this case was down to Errol Morris being able to skillfully create a legal narrative, the crime story, and present it as a film narrative.

Errol Morris was born in Hewlett, Long Island, New York in 1948. His parents were a Juilliard graduate and a doctor. Morris is a well educated man; he completed his undergraduate study at the University of Wisconsin and majored in history. He was studying for a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley until his fascination with movies got the better of him. Morris has said that he had two real passions, the first being Film Noir, the influence of which is clearly visible in The Thin Blue Line and the second being serial killers. Morris got a job programming shows at the Pacific Film Archive. Here he would watch three or four films a day. A headline in the San Francisco Chronicle that read "450 Dead Pets Going to Napa Valley," inspired Morris to beg and borrow the money to make the Gates of Heaven movie in 1978. This was Morris’ first film, a portrait of an insolvent pet cemetery. The movie was met with high acclaim and set the scene for his movie making career. It was three years before Morris created another movie. Vernon Florida followed in 1981. I argue that this is where Morris started to show traits of his legal mindset. Gates of Heaven was an entertaining mediation on the human condition, whereas Vernon Florida started out as an investigative piece, an exposé. Morris was interested in the story of this Florida community with the highest proportion of self-inflicted amputee insurance claimants. The film was originally to be called Nub City. Morris’ interviews and investigation were met with various death threats from citizens of Vernon and this prompted a rethink and rename of the movie to Vernon Florida. The new agenda of the movie concentrated on Vernon’s more eccentric citizens: example, a woman who believes that her collection of radioactive sand is growing, the preacher giving a sermon on the definition of the word "Therefore," and an obsessive turkey hunter who respects the "gobblers" he likes to track down and kill.

After making Vernon Florida in 1981, Morris experienced financial difficulties. Out of work and broke he was fortunate to find work as a Private Detective. I would argue here also that not everybody is suited to that type of work. Morris obviously had the intellect, astuteness and the ability to reveal truth and meaning from mystery to be able to gain employment in this field. This exposure undoubtedly helped Morris sharpen his interviewing skills - his approach of staying quiet and letting the subject indict themselves is very apparent in the Thin Blue Line. ‘Over a period of years he conducted a great number of audio interviews with serial killers, amongst them Ed Gein – reputedly the model for Psycho – during which time he developed his individualistic ‘shut up and listen’ interview style: “I used to see if I could record a whole 90 minute tape without my voice appearing on it once”, he recalled. Morris discovered that no-one – not even a serial killer – likes a silence and most people rush to fill it, opening themselves up in the process – even betraying themselves – much more than they would under ‘normal circumstances’. [Macdonald 2001]

Immersed into the investigation circles, Morris would have soon began thinking and operating as a detective in a process of association, a form of osmosis. In a telephone interview with William Phillips on March 20, 1998, Morris talks of his detective work – “I fortunately had the opportunity through a mutual friend to work for one of the best private detectives in America. This was not the low end of the detective business, it was the high end. So instead of doing matrimonial cases or skip tracing, I was working on Wall Street, watching trading, mergers and acquisitions, and huge corporate cases. And at this time I could open The New York Times to the front page of the financial section and usually find one or two, maybe even three, cases that I was involved with. It was a high-profile detective job. It was a really terrific time, and I think I was good at it, if only because when you strip away everything, people have these images of what being a detective is like. But when you strip all of that away, it really comes down to your ability to talk to people, and, even more significantly, to have people talk to you. And that's really what I do in my filmmaking as well. So, you might say that there was a detective element in my filmmaking well before this time, and a filmmaking element in my detective work. It's talking to people, getting them to talk to you, and listening”. [Errol Morris - Bedford/St Martin’s 1999].

A year earlier Morris said pretty much the same thing as in the William Philips interview, during an interview between Morris and ‘The Onion a.v. club’ December 1997:
O: Do you think your experience as a private detective has helped you as a documentarian?
EM: Well, you know, I was a private detective before and after I became a documentarian.
O: That's what you were doing between Vernon, Florida and The Thin Blue Line.
EM: Right. I mean, I think they both have informed each other, because there's a great similarity between the two. I mean, the kind of private-detective work I did, I was sort of on the high end of investigation, because I was a Wall Street investigator doing really, really huge cases. But when you clear aside all of the fancy frills about private investigators and private-detective work, it really comes down to people talking to each other and people being willing to give you information about themselves. Nothing really more than that. That's the essence of it. [Errol Morris - Onion a.v. Club 1997]

As a matter of fact there is very little difference between a criminal investigator and an investigative journalist; both professionals’ exhibit similar traits and I would say that the investigative journalist is perhaps a more ferocious hunter. Working very closely in the American legal system, and having ties with the Washington Post, Morris would have been personally intrigued by the Randall Adams case and the detective within him harmonised with the filmmaker, which contributed to the making of The Thin Blue Line in 1988. It was in fact during the 80’s when Morris was researching a film to be called Dr. Death1, which focused on the practices of a Texas-based criminal psychologist, nicked named Dr. Death, who by chance had given evidence to secure the death penalty against Randall Adams, that Morris met Adams. Having interviewed Adams and viewed the original transcripts from the trial, Morris began what turned out to be a three year investigation, which culminated in the making of The Thin Blue Line.

So how does The Thin Blue Line present a legal narrative? The text itself is presented as a representation of facts, a reconstruction of a complicated crime scene and in-depth investigation into a miscarriage of justice. It is in essence a carefully constructed presentation of the facts of the case. Morris is presenting us with the findings of his investigation in a legal fashion. After all the text was accepted wholly by the American legal system and the case against Randall Adams was dropped as a result. In the movie, Morris presents us with the witnesses and uses the edit of the movie, in much the same way that a barrister would carefully condition a witness in the stand, in a form of legal discourse.

David M. Kaplan, Ph.D. (Polytechnic University-Brooklyn) talks of legal discourse as - “Take legal discourse, for example. The kind of language used by lawyers, judges, and those involved in legal decisions involves both narrative-interpretation and rational argumentation. Legal discourse is interpretative in a similar way that literary theory is. Both kinds of interpretation are based on hermeneutic rules of holism, where an interpretation of particular passages should “fit” with an interpretation of the whole. The task is to find an acceptable and defensible interpretation though the use of textual evidence by evoking ideas of narrative coherence, intelligibility, acceptability, and other interpretive practices that would make one reading more plausible than another”. [Kaplan 2003]

But this alone does not qualify the movie as legal narrative. The film itself is hailed as a landmark of documentary cinema. Instead of imaging a non-fiction film as a representation of reality, the film questions the confines of documentary film in both technique and content. The Thin Blue Line manages to remain neutral and never ascertains that any one testimony is more correct than another, instead, the film's negated narration and numerous ‘points of view’ raise the existence of the impossibility of objective truth. The skills Morris uses as a detective are exceptional, as is his use of cinematography.

Undoubtedly, Morris’ questioning and interviewing skills learnt from being a practicing detective would have been employed effectively in the interviews he conducted as a docu-auteur. In The Thin Blue Line production, Morris would have been able to use the interpersonal skills and rhetorical questioning methods that had served him well as a detective, to style an effective response from the interview subjects.

From the way Morris edited The Thin Blue Line, he had already deduced that Harris was guilty and Adams had been set up. He had got an angle on the cover-up and corruption, but in constructing the film, he carefully fed the audience with piecemeal parts of the story, allowing the viewer to construct meaning. This use of spectator as surrogate object is a trait of Morris’ style; in The Thin Blue Line he makes the audience a surrogate jury, example: ‘….all interviews are photographed using the same lens (a Zeiss 50mm) from exactly the same distance, seated in exactly the same folding chair, with similar cool, neutral backgrounds behind them (“I wanted them all to have the same claim on the audience’s attention”, Morris later said, “I didn’t want the audience to deduce anything about any of the characters except what they saw on their faces and heard in their words”)’ [Macdonald 2001]

Morris’ use of reconstruction works well in the presentation of the facts of the case, he creates truth and some conflict through careful use of ‘flashback’ and reconstruction. He creates conflict by presenting evidence through witnesses, presenting truth filtered through motivation, perception, prejudice and fantasy. The evidential truth is proved to be fallible and the established truth in the narrative presentation is through historical event, that being the murder itself. The film's lack of narration and multiple points of view raise the spectre of the impossibility of objective truth.

‘It is the reconstructions which actually express the core theme of the film: that the truth about an event is often very hard to know. Each of the dozen times or so that we see the key event – the murder of the police officer on a dark roadside – we see it from the point of view of a different unreliable or deceitful witness – the ‘Rashomon2 effect’ ……. ‘In a brilliant stroke, the only version of events Morris resists showing is the TRUE version – the one showing David Harris alone in the car, pulling the trigger’. [Macdonald 2001]

One very significant area of the Adams/Harris story that has not been addressed by Morris in the film is sexuality. Randall Adams was a twenty-eight-year-old man who went to a drive-in movie with a sixteen-year-old boy he had hitched-hiked a lift from. Adams supplied Harris with alcohol and marijuana and he had been is Dallas for some weeks – working. In reality, this would be an important angle of enquiry. Harris wanted to stay with Adams at the Motel the night they had been out together and he was evidently aggrieved that Adams refused this request. Did the Dallas police and the District Attorney believe that Adams had tried to seduce Harris? Morris makes no attempt to address these issues in the movie and neither had the DA, police or defence attorneys at the trial. Morris’s self-reflexive journey of truth is therefore, at times, tactical, subverting actuality in favour of exposing falsehood and corruption at a higher level.

I have established that Morris was trying to free an innocent man accused of murder through his investigation into the Adams case. Morris as auteur, in a similar fashion as any skilled legal representative would not offer any information that was likely to prejudice his client. Adams' possible homosexuality would have undoubtedly prejudiced a jury at the original trials and in a similar fashion would have prejudiced the viewer as surrogate jury. Charles Musser, Associate Professor of American Studies and Film Studies, Yale University, offers one possible argument to support this – “The film touches on issues of feminism and racism, but when it comes to sexual orientation, The Thin Blue Line is silent. There are understandable reasons for this. Morris was trying to free an innocent man accused of murder. Adams' possible homosexuality is the kind of evidence that would prejudice a jury or the courts. Not central to the question of murder, Adams' sexual orientation was excluded as inflammatory. In addition, Randall Adams was still in prison when the film was made, a time when inmates identified as homosexuals in many Texas jails and prisons wore specially colored wrist bands and suffered extraordinary abuse as a result. Exploring this issue would have been irresponsible to Adams, but its absence from the film was also convenient, allowing Morris to concentrate on the more eternal verities of dissembling and deception. It allows the film to impact on our understanding of the judicial process and the consequences of the death penalty rather than discrimination against gays. This is only to remind us that The Thin Blue Line, like any film, has limits to what it is able to achieve in meditating on and revealing truth.” [Musser 1996]

A classic contribution of Verité film, the Zapruder3 filming of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy creates a connection between Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and Oliver Stone’s JFK. The striking similarities between the two texts, both offered under the umbrella of Cinema Verité (although Thin Blue Line would more accurately fall into the post-modern documentary bracket), are both films are connected to undertaking an investigation. Both films are about a murder - by shooting, in Dallas, in November, and perhaps more disturbingly, they are both about a state conspiracy/scapegoat conviction.

The Thin Blue Line as a text has been compared with Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", a non-fiction novel about a multiple murder. The author’s investigation into the crime, led to the capture, trial and subsequent execution of the two men responsible for the murder of a family. The case was solved by the book, through its narrative. Had Morris been influenced by the style of Capote’s non-fiction crime novel? In this novel Truman Capote researched a real murder case intensely to write the book. The text is far from being speculative and fictionalised; it relates a realistic account of what the people were like, the murderers and the family they killed. The narrative seeks to raise questions as well as answering others. A quote from The Reading Group, an on-line forum provides a synopsis of the Capote novel - “On a November night in 1959 a wealthy Kansas farmer, his wife and their two teenage children were shot and killed. The two young men who had murdered them were eventually hanged for the crime. In the six-year interim, Truman Capote researched and wrote In Cold Blood, an investigative classic which raises as many compelling and horrifying questions as it answers”. [The Reading Group 2002].

I am suggesting through this essay that there is a direct correlation between ‘the fictional detective’ as a narrative form and the ‘legal narrative’ created by Morris in The Thin Blue Line and investigators in general. A juxtaposition of narrative structures. Having studied closely the narrative constructed by Morris in The Thin Blue Line and researched the narrative and power in detective fiction; it is possible to see the connection. I suggest that fictional detectives such as Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin are based entirely on real people, practicing criminal investigation, after all it is said that private investigation (espionage) is the second oldest profession in the world, the first being prostitution.

In the book – Narrative & Power in 19th Century Detective Fiction (Detection & its Designs) by Peter Thoms (1998), Thoms argues that “19th Century detective fiction is an inherently self-reflexive form, which exposes simultaneously the constructedness of its narratives and the motives underlying their creation” [Thoms 1998]. He goes onto to explore how to writers of early detective fiction, narrative is not an issue of the ‘what is’ (a reflective view of events), but more a case of ‘what is created’, therefore the process of narrative construction becomes the subject of the texts. This is exactly what Morris has done with The Thin Blue Line. Morris is the detective and his investigation into the Adams case is creating the legal narrative - the investigation is the narrative. The detective inside Morris was operating on an equal standing to Morris the director. In an interview with Dave Avdoian, entitled ‘An Hour with Errol, published on NewEnglandFilm.com 2001, Errol Morris was discussing his search for truth as a filmmaker – in which he said “I mean, there’s an investigation involved: there’s reading the stuff, there’s talking to people, there is, if you like, an empirical process of trying to learn about the world, learn about the context of the remark and a way of judging its truthfulness.
I don’t think you ever know with 100% certainty about stuff. But you always try at least. I believe people should always try to learn more about evidence. There’s this remarkable passage -- I don’t know if you’re familiar with Janet Malcolm’s work, she writes for the "New Yorker" -- you know this sort of post-modern idea that there really is no truth, that we all subjectively interpret the world to our own ends and our own image. I’ve never quite liked that idea. I think that there are all kinds of obstacles to finding the truth: self-deception, self-interest, and so on and so forth. But those are not insuperable obstacles. It just means that you try harder to look beyond those kinds of things to try to find some deeper hidden reality.
I believe in truth.” [Errol Morris - Dave Avdoian, 2001]
In many of the numerous interviews published, Morris has described himself as a new kind of hyphenate, a director-detective, and he has created a niche for himself by telling the stories of unique individuals in his distinctive voice. Morris as the detective generally is an authoritarian figure, a controlling figure. He exerts his control over the characters in The Thin Blue Line expertly, and it was not only David Harris who was the wrong doer in this story, it’s the corrupt system that is under the spotlight, the judge, the police and the perjury of the witnesses. Morris carefully manipulates the characters and lets them indict themselves by remaining silent after a carefully placed suggestion or question, leaving the tape rolling and removing all prompting or questioning through the edit. This is classic detection and masterful editing techniques.

It was interesting to observe how Morris dealt with the police detectives in his investigation. He allowed them to expose the errors they had made in the Adams case, rather than challenge them on these. They appeared to have played directly into his hands, strengthening Morris’ investigation and making no attempt to cover their tracks. At the time Morris made the documentary, Adams’ sentence had already been commuted to Life Imprisonment, there was no possibility of a retrial and you would have to suppose that the police detectives considered that the case had been resolved and there was no possibility that a documentary featuring Randall Adams and David Harris would have unearthed the corruption that surrounded the previous trials. Thom remarks in his book, “Indeed, the thrill of competition pervades the investigation, with the detective taking on not only the puzzle but also its author (the criminal) and of course, any rival detectives who would presume to solve the mystery. Thus detection serves the detective’s egoistic need to display his power, which derives from his storytelling skill”. [Thom 1998] In reality the police detectives were no threat to Morris, they may have had the tools at their disposal to solve this crime properly, but they chose not to do so.

In the case there were in total five police detectives involved. An internal affairs investigator (Dale Holt) and Three Dallas officers and one Vidor officer. The main officer involved in the Adams case was Gus Rose (Dallas), and Sam Kittrell (Vidor) was directly involved with David Harris. Gus Rose, now deceased (2002), was the main homicide officer in Dallas involved with the Randall Adams case, was a highly respected peace officer with many years experience. During his career he was the first detective to interrogate Lee Harvey Oswald after the assassination of President Kennedy. Sam Kittrell is currently the Police Chief of Orange County (2003).
John Douglas Legendary head of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit and famous criminal profiler links detection to story telling – “The one pursuit in school for which I did show a flair for was storytelling, in some way, it may have contributed to my becoming a crime investigator. Detectives and crime-scene analysts have to take a bunch of disparate and seemingly unrelated clues and make them into a coherent narrative, so story telling ability is an important talent, particularly in homicide investigations, where the victim can’t relate his or her own story. If the detective hopes to exert a lasting impression upon his audience and to install his own version of events as the accepted truth, he must posses the narrative knack of organising the evidence in a persuasive way”. [The Hannibal Library - John Douglas 2003]
It is fair then to assume that a story of a crime is a narrative text and a criminal investigation becomes a story about making a story. Dennis Porter, author of The Pursuit of Crime: Art & Ideology in Detective Fiction says “Critics of detective fiction have observed that texts contain two stories, the concealed story of the crime and the visible story of the investigation, which unfolds as the uncovering of the criminal story”. [Porter 1981].

Conclusion - In my view Errol Morris presented The Thin Blue Line as a legal narrative by the nature of conducting the project as an investigation. The findings of the investigation were used to create the movie. Through Morris’ understanding of the ‘legal narrative’, the compelling crime story, he was able to construct the movie in such a persuasive fashion. Julie Michaels (Law in the Age of Images), speaking about New York Law School Professor Richard K. Sherwin [When Law Goes Pop: the Vanishing Line between Law and Pop Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2000)], “…. traditional forms of legal argumentation, based on inductive and deductive logic, are very different from story-based thinking. "Gripped by the drama of a well-told story, we are often moved to think and feel in particular ways," Sherwin writes. In the hands of a masterful defence attorney like Gerry Spence, storytelling can reach mythic proportions”. [Michaels 2000]

There are of course a number of questions that remain unanswered with the Randall Adams case – How could this have happened? Being just one of them. There has been considerable discussion on the corruption element of this story on the Internet and no doubt in other circles also, such as - “Another factor that may have reinforced the authorities' misjudgment, consciously or subconsciously, was Harris's age. When a police officer is murdered, authorities tend to be intent on imposing the most severe possible punishment, which in Texas, and most other U.S. jurisdictions, is death. Texas law, however, did not permit the death penalty for persons under 17. Harris was only 16 and ineligible for the death penalty. Adams was 27 and eligible. [Warden 2002] and “People prefer their stories neat," Sherwin writes in opening his discussion of the film and its influence. That's true of the trial lawyers who prosecuted Randall Dale Adams and selected the facts that made their case. It's also true of filmmaker Errol Morris, who selected the facts that would exonerate the man on death row. "The trouble with having one's story neat," Sherwin adds, "is that they tend to leave things out, the things that make a story messy." He argues that the Adams case is much messier than either side would admit that crucial, confusing questions are not addressed. Yet the documentary's cinematic techniques, even as it questions people's perceptions of reality, succeed in constructing a powerful argument for Adams's innocence”. [Michaels 2000]
Lee Ellis 2003

[Essay 5317 word count]

Final words:
"In the beginning, I blamed David," Adams said in an interview with Texas Monthly in 2001. "But David did not have the power to arrest me, indict me, and sentence me to die. The problem is larger than David Harris. Our criminal justice system, on paper, is the best in the world. But we're human, and so we make mistakes. If you execute and execute and execute, at some point you will execute an innocent man." [Warden 2002]
…… I remain in contact with David Harris, the killer in The Thin Blue Line, but not Randall Adams.
O: I understand that he objected to his portrayal in that movie.
EM: Well, he didn't object to his portrayal. He sued me for money. He said I was getting rich off The Thin Blue Line.
O: That strikes me as extremely ungrateful.
EM: Uh, yes.
O: You stay in touch with the killer, though. What is your correspondence like?
EM: It's, you know, not extensive, but I actually do care about him. And it's clear that he will be executed by the state of Texas.
[Errol Morris - Onion a.v. Club 1997]

Bibliography:

Thoms, P. (1998). Detection & its Designs: Narrative & Power in 19th Century Detective Fiction.
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701.

BFI Collections (2001) Sleeve Notes – BFI Video (Thin Blue Line)
Macdonald, Kevin

Akutagawa, Ryunosuke (1952), Rashomon and Other Stories, trans. Takashi Kojima
New York: Liveright

Amazon.com: (2003) In Cold Blood – Truman Capote (extract) -
http://%20www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679745580/ref=nosim/hallbook/002-0464715-4253610

NewEnglandFilm.com (1997-2001) An Hour with Errol (part 2) by Dave Avdoian
http://www.newenglandfilm.com/news/archives/01july/errol.htm

Hart, David (2000): THE RELATIVE AND PARTIAL NATURE OF TRUTH AND MEMORY - THE "RASHOMON EFFECT"
http://www.arts.adelaide.edu.au/personal/DHart/ReelHistory/SeminarReading/Rashomon.html

Warden, Rob (2002) The Center on Wrongful Convictions - The actual killer of a Dallas police officer sent Randall Dale Adams to death row for the crime
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/exonerations/RDAdams.htm

THE HANNIBAL LIBRARY (2003) - Featuring John Douglas:
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit
http://www.pentaone.com/hannibal/douglasexcerpt1.shtml

Douglas, John E., Stephen Singular, and Mark Olshaker (1996-2003)
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671528904/103-4311492-2877450?vi=glance

The Onion a.v. Club Volume 32 Issue 18 (December 10, 1997) (2003)
http://www.theavclub.com/avclub3218/avfeature3218.html

Narrative Evidence and Discourse Ethics (2003)
http://ls.poly.edu/~dkaplan/narrative.html

Michaels, Julie (2000) – Law & Images: Boston College Law School Magazine – Rollins College
http://www.newsorlando.com/law_and_images.htm

Musser, Charles (1996) - University of San Francisco Law Review Volume 30, Number 4
Reprinted by permission of the Law Review© cite as 30 U.S.F.L. REV. 963
http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/usf/musser30.htm

Videography:

Errol Morris (1988) – The Thin Blue Line (USA/UK/1988/Colour/97 Minutes) - BFIV085

Page Notes:

1. Dr. Death:
Under Texas law, in order for Adams to be sentenced to death, the jury was required to determine, among other things, whether there was a "beyond a reasonable doubt that Adams would commit future acts of violence. To establish whether Adams met that criterion, the prosecution called Dr. James Grigson, a Dallas psychiatrist also known as "Dr. Death," and Dr. John Holbrook, former chief of psychiatry for the Texas Department of Corrections. Although the American Psychiatric Association was on record that future behavior was impossible to predict, Grigson and Holbrook testified that Adams would be dangerous unless executed; Grigson testified similarly in more than 100 other Texas cases that ended in death sentences. After hearing the psychiatrists, Adams's jury found him qualified to die. Judge Metcalfe sentenced him according. It was Grigson, who was the Dr. Death that Morris was researching prior to investigating the Randall Adams case.

2. Rashomon effect:
Refers to the text of Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon (1951) 1 hr 23. A rape and murder is witnessed by a small group of individuals (a woodcutter, a priest, a police agent, a bandit, the wife and the husband), all of whom recollect the events in a different way. [Hart 2000]. The characters and witnesses seek shelter at the crumbling Rashomon Gate to recount their varying recollections of the incident at the grove, hence the phrase ‘Rashomon Effect’. ‘The "Rashomon" was the largest gate in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. It was 106 feet wide and 26 feet deep, and was topped with a ridge-pole; its stone wall rose 75 feet high. This gate was constructed in 789 when the then capital of Japan was transferred to Kyoto. With the decline of West Kyoto, the gate fell into bad repair, cracking and crumbling in many places, and became a hide-out for thieves and robbers and a place for abandoning unclaimed corpses’. [Akutagawa 1952, p. 34]

3. Zapruder Film:
The Abraham Zapruder home movie of the Kennedy assassination is the only known film of the entire Kennedy assassination. It is a silent, 8mm colour recording of the Kennedy motorcade just before, during, and immediately after the shooting taken by Abraham Zapruder. Two major investigations into the presidents’ assassination, the Warren Commission in 1963-1964 and House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977-1978, relied on it to answer questions about how the shooting happened.

Appendices:

Appendix: A [Complete Plot Line] - The Thin Blue Line:

All times approximated:

Start to 5 minutes: Summary of the entire plot.

Dallas crime scene - Officer Woods
Randall Adams, David Harris
Gus Rose offers Adams signed confession, places murder weapon (revolver) on table and asks Adams to pick it up. Rose gets agitated and pulls revolver on Adams. [One would have to question the validity of these actions. They would be directly attributable to Adams’ version of events, and he did have an axe to grind].

5 to 20 minutes:
Adams protests innocence during questioning for murder of Robert Wood. He is refused legal rights, No legal representation or phone call.
Dallas detectives tell their story.
Detectives relate their hunch that police office was only going to warn driver about a light out- re-enactment. Detective introduces woman police officer, Robert Wood’s partner; she was drinking a milk-shake (malt); re-enactment
The search for the blue "Vega": the policewoman hypnotised.
Detectives frustrated because they haven’t broken the case for more than a month - then the “break” comes from Vidor detective Sam Kittrell.
David Harris; three friends of David say he swore he killed a policeman - David tells the story he told the police; he recalls “Time just stopped”

20 to 30 minutes:
Randall Adams' version of the night in question.
At the drive in movie, then back to the hotel to sleep.
The "Confession": Randall Adams' describes the statement he signed finally.
The two Dallas detectives comment on the "confession"; Randall Adams denies his confession was meant as a “real” confession.
Blue "Vega" becomes blue Mercury "Comet."
Randall Adams comments on irony of woman police officer shooting at car and missing it.
Sam Kittrell locates Mercury Comet – but owner’s daughter had crashed the car towed and crushed - no way to determine if the car had bullet holes.

30 to 40 minutes: The Defense
Edith James, Randall Adams' attorney, introduced. Describes DA Prosecutor – Douglas Mulder, perfect conviction record.
Dennis White, Adams' 2nd attorney believes Adams has a weak case against him, no substantial evidence except Harris.
Dennis White describes Vidor, Texas - home of the Texas Ku Klux Klan. No blacks will stop there for petrol or be seen at all at night. The citizens of Vidor considered wrongly that Officer Woods was a black man. He felt they animosity he received in Vidor, was due to people thinking he was there to discredit Harris.
David Harris recounts a crime he committed in Vidor. Armed Robbery and burglary.
Former associates of David Harris recount more stories Harris told them.
White and James question the facts in the case.
Judge Metcalfe introduction. Metcalf recounts story of John Dillinger ambushed by the police the lady in red was the lady in orange.

40 to 45 minutes:
Exploration of Inconsistencies in the Case.

White introduces Harris crime spree theory.
Randall Adams summarizes the many inconsistencies in the case.
Judge Metcalf - not allowed to introduce the other Harris crimes during trial.
Randall Adams' brother did not testify- The brother recalled statement, he was afraid of perjuring himself (he had been arrested, too)

Adams considered being of a convenient age to be prosecuted – a drifter.
Harris’ story according to Adams was two hours later on than actual time. Officer Woods killed at 12.30, two and a half hours after Adams had returned to Motel.
Teresa Turko testimony focused on the "fur lined parka" and the bushy hair. She states from back of car driver had bushy hair like Adams. Harris was wearing a fur lined parka the night of killing.

45 to 56 minutes: Witnesses
Edith James, attorney for Adams, describes the appearance of surprise witnesses
Emily Miller recalls following the Boston Blackie mysteries. She completely invalidates any credibility that she may have had. “I’m always looking – because you never know what might come up. I like to be able to help in situations like that”
Robert Miller tells his story. Identifies Adam’s hair and moustache. He states his wife, Emily will turn anyone in. She had reported him to police before.
Edith James notes some of the facts about the Millers' story. Emily Miller had been sacked two weeks previously for stealing. Robert and Emily Miller were at Police station, under arrest for drunkenness and disturbing the piece, when they made statements to Dallas detectives indicting Adams.
Mrs Boyes, a witness for the defence, counters the Millers' stories. She rings Dennis White.

56 to 1:06 minutes: The Conviction
Michael Randell, a salesman, another witness for the prosecution, confirms what the Millers' story, but interestingly he states he saw two people in the blue car, but did not see any shooting. Interestingly, Morris allows Randell to offer an inconsistency during the movie (or did he!!) - During his interview, Randell having already stated that he was alone in the car, also states that when we went by the car – he could not recall if the police car was in front or behind the blue comet.

A Dallas detective confirms that all three witnesses and the testimony from Teresa Turko supported the state's case against Randall Adams. He states that they could not have relied on a voluntary statement from Adams.

Judge Metcalfe admits that he was emotionally moved by the DA Prosecutor Douglas Mulder’s speech about the "thin blue line" that separates the police from anarchy.

Randall Adams found guilty and sentenced to death.

This scene ends with flashing red lights.

1:06 to 1:15 minutes
The evaluation by the "killer shrinks" Randall Adams is interviewed by two psychiatrists who confirm that he is a dangerous man. They were looking for signs of remorse, but in reality an innocent man would not show signs of remorse. Grigson likened Adams to Adolf Hitler or Charlie Mansion.
Judge Don Metcalfe expresses surprise that anyone would shoot a police officer.
Dennis White comments on the process that led to the conviction.
Adams' talks about the reality of the electric chair.
David Harris shares his reaction to the death penalty.
Edith James notes that an appeal was filed.
Melvyn Bruder, a lawyer who filed Adams' appeal, explains that they lost their first appeal to a higher court by 9 to 0.

1:15 to 1:18 minutes
Judge Metcalfe notes that an appeal to the Supreme Court resulted in an 8 to 1 vote in favour of Randall Adams to overturn the original verdict.
Melvyn Bruder explains that he never got a chance to defend Adams in a retrial because the Attorney General of the State of Texas commuted Adams' sentence to life imprisonment, thus eliminating the possibility of retrial.
Dennis White, lawyer for Adams, admits that he has quit his criminal law practice after this experience.
Melvyn Bruder comments on the case.

1:18 to 1:30 minutes
Sam Kittrell talks on how David Harris got in trouble with the law soon after the trial.
David Harris explains how easy it is to lie to the police and tells how the police coached him.
Former witnesses review details of the case.
Michael Randell explains that he was not alone in the car on the night of the murder. He had a woman with him and he lied the police, because he was married.
Randell states that the DA put words in the Miller’s mouths and they were being paid to say the things they did.
David Harris comments on charges against him and explains how he had done a deal to have charges dropped in exchange for a testimony.
Harris reflects on what happened the night policeman got shot.
Emily Miller reviews her being called to observe a police line-up.
David Harris is arrested for murder of Mark Walter Mays.

1:30 to 1:38 minutes Retrospective
Randall Adams describes Dallas County as "hell on earth".
Sam Kittrell gives details of David Harris' early life.
David Harris explains some of his life story.
Morris finishes by playing an audio tape of his last interview with David Harris.

Appendix: B [Closing interview between Errol Morris and David Harris] – TRANSCRIPT

December 5 1986

EM: Would you say that Adams is a pretty unlucky fellow?

DH: Definitely: If it wasn’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have none.

EM: What was the bad luck?

DH: Could be any number of things, you know.

Depends on how much you wanna look at it. It’s like I told you a while ago about the guy that didn’t have no place to stay………If he’d had a place to stay, he’d never have nowhere to go, right?
EM: You mean, if you would’ve stayed there at the motel that night, this would never have happened?
DH: Good possibility. Good possibility. Heard of the proverbial scapegoat?
There’s probably been thousands of innocent people convicted and probably thousands more.
Why?
Who Know?
EM: Is he innocent?
DH: Did you ask him?
EM: Well what do you think… about whether or not he’s innocent?
DH: I’m sure he is.
EM: How can you be sure?
DH: Cause I’m the one that knows.
EM: Were you surprised that the police blamed him?
DH: They didn’t blame him.
I did.
Scared sixteen year old kid. He sure would like to get out of it if he can.
EM: Do you think they believe you?
DH: No doubt.
Must have.
They didn’t have nothing else, you know, until I gave them something, so ……..
I guess they got something, they went with it, you know.
EM: Were you surprised they believed you?
DH: I might have been, I don’t know. I was hoping they would believe me, you know. After all was said and done, it was kind of unbelievable, you know.
But there it is.
I’ve always thought about …… if you could say there was reason that Randall Adams is in jail, it might be because of the fact that he didn’t have no place for someone to stay that helped him that night ….. Landed him where he’s at.
That might be the reason.
That might be the only total reason why he’s where he’s at today.