• Registered: 2015-06-22
  • Posts: 3,312

Topic: The Lightning Fast Fictional Justice System

I was going to add this to the DC post, but I think this is an interesting topic that probably has a ton more examples than I can think of.

But I'm watching a certain DC show and a certain character got himself intentionally arrested (there, I'm being vague enough not to have to put spoiler tags).  And the whole thing is sorta played out in the cold open as a musical montage.  Getting booked, going to trial, and getting shipped off to jail. 

It's fine to move the plot along.  But at the same time, events that were happening elsewhere seem to have *just* happened.  This character was arrested, booked, went to trial, was convicted, and was sentenced in a few days?  Maybe?  Based on what's happening in other stories, it might've only been one day.

According to some very lazy research, from start to finish, the average time from crime to prison is six months.  Even if you plead guilty (like this character did), it still takes a while to get in front of a judge.  The definition of "speedy trial" seems to be about a month.

And I see this a lot.  I'm sure it happens a lot in shows like Law and Order, but one show I watched over the summer was Oz.  That was a show that tried to focus on the reality of live in prison, but they had death penalty cases that are tried and sentenced and carried out over the course of maybe a few weeks?  It got to be pretty laughable as people are shuffled in and out of jail with essentially no time passing.

I get that shows like these don't want to sit around for weeks and months for the legal process to work itself out, but it seems like something that most shows are happy to fast-forward through unless that's essentially the whole point.

Anyone else have any examples of crazy-fast legal proceedings on TV?

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
  • Posts: 3,312

Re: The Lightning Fast Fictional Justice System

In the show I was watching, the character was already in prison and it was so fast that no one knew it happened

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
  • Posts: 4,692

Re: The Lightning Fast Fictional Justice System

You know, that episode of TITANS aired over a year ago! I think you can relax about spoilers. Haha!

It's odd: there may be a TV Tropes page somewhere about a ridiculously speedy trial, but all I see is the vague umbrella of "Hollywood Law" and "Artistic License - Law." https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ … LicenseLaw

The entry remarks that "Real litigation or prosecution takes months, not minutes, and almost none of it happens in court. Watching lawyers read mountains of documents and write briefs doesn't make for an enjoyable show, so creators modify the process to be entertaining to the audience. This causes the legal procedures portrayed in fiction to have little to no correlation with how the process would go down in Real Life."

I do recall a Season 1 episode of BONES, a forensic procedural where the leading lady crime scientist has to go to court to present her evidence and we're informed that it happens all the time, but this is the first time it's shown on camera and the trial felt like it was within days of the initial investigation. Generally, cop shows like BROOKLYN NINE NINE seem comfortable doing a time skip from investigation to trial if the trial is relevant or showing the investigation as a flashback before showing the trial in the present.

How ridiculously fast were Oliver and Barry's murder/conspiracy/vigilantism trials on THE FLASH and ARROW?

However... I don't feel that any version of the DC Universe with superhero teams like the Titans and presumably the Justice League and the rest is going to be quite like 'our' world. In a reality where all paranormal and science fiction concepts like demons, aliens, time travelers, mutants, poltergeists and such are real, the legal system must have heightened capacity to deal with all the complexities and must have hastened its methods for processing more 'mundane' crimes that don't involve devil robots and Earth-invading starfish and yellow fear monsters and fifth dimensional imps.