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Theaters of Proof: Visual Evidence and the Law in Call Northside 777

2001; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.292095

1556-5068

Jennifer L. Mnookin, Nancy Martha West,

Digital Media Forensic Detection

This Article, a collaboration between a law professor specializing in evidence and an English professor who writes about film, analyzes a film of the late 1940s - Call Northside 777 (henceforth Northside), directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Jimmy Stewart - as a study in evidence. We argue that the film, an explicit retelling of an actual Chicago wrongful conviction case, speaks powerfully to the question of what counts as proof and what persuades, both in the courtroom and in our cultural imagination. The film strongly suggests that legal conceptions of what constitutes good evidence may deviate from more broadly-held ideas of legitimate proof. Legal standards of evidence are portrayed as rigid and conservative, too willing to rely on the reliable and too resistant to novel forms of knowledge. The Article explores in detail how Northside sets up a hierarchy of evidence, with eyewitness evidence at the bottom, expert evidence in the middle, and photographic and visual evidence portrayed as the best evidence of all. We show, however, that in the end, Northside's hierarchy depends on a host of simplifications, both of the historical record on which Northside is based, and also of the ways that visual evidence is made and deployed.