Breaker Morant - Three Australian lieutenants are court martialed for killings prisoners as a way of diverting attention from war crimes committed by their superiors. Length: 107 minutes Director: Bruce Beresford Stars: Edward Woodward, Jack Thompson, John Waters Watch Movie: Breaker Morant Best Lawyer Movies 1970 - 1979
In Canton, Mississippi, a fearless young lawyer and his assistant defend a black man accused of murdering two white men who raped his ten-year-old daughter, inciting violent retribution and revenge from the Ku Klux Klan. Director: Joel Schumacher | Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey
An aging legendary lawyer, Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles), is hired to defend the young men with the modest hope of sparing them from the gallows. The film is based on Clarence Darrow’s actual defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, director Richard Fleischer turns the sordid details of their vicious crime into a passionate attack on the death penalty.
Dec 31, 2019 · Their lawyer, played by Orson Welles, must then work hard to defend the two young men and save them from execution. The film is based on the well-known and often-cited Leopold and Loeb case of 1924. Trivia : Despite his top-billed status, Welles does not appear in the film until an hour and five minutes in.
Deemed one of the greatest courtroom dramas of all time and based on the novel with the same title, Anatomy of a Murder follows Michigan lawyer Paul Biegler (played by James Stewart), who has his work cut out for him after agreeing to defend Lt. Manion (played by Ben Gazzarra), who murdered a local bar owner after learning he’s been accused of rape.
Philadelphia (1993) Directed by Jonathan Demme, Philadelphia tells the story of lawyer Andrew Beckett, who struggles to hide his homosexuality, as well as his HIV status, for fear that they will have a negative impact on his career at a prestigious Philadelphia law firm.
Trivia: Julia Roberts’ salary for her role as Erin Brockovich made her the first actress in Hollywood to earn more than $20 million. 9.
Set in 1839, Amistad tells the story of a slave ship sailing from Cuba to the United States. In the film, directed by Steven Spielberg, Cinque (played by Djimon Hounsou) leads the slaves in an uprising, which results in them being held as prisoners in Connecticut.
Trivia: Witness for the Prosecution was the last film that Power completed before he died of a heart attack in November of 1958. 6. Legally Blonde (2001) Based on the novel by Amanda Brown, Legally Blonde is a courtroom comedy that stars Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods, a sorority girl from California.
2. 12 Angry Men (1957) This classic courtroom drama was directed by Sidney Lumet and details the deliberations of 12 men, all of whom are part of the jury deciding the fate of a poor young man who’s been accused of murder. If found guilty, he will face the death penalty.
More is known for standing up to King Henry VIII (played by Robert Shaw) and refusing to pressure the Pope into allowing the king to have his marriage annulled so he could remarry. More, who was a devout Catholic, stood by his convictions to not allow the king to divorce, despite intense pressure to do otherwise.
Colin Eggleston’s hybrid horror/thriller, relationship drama, Long Weekend, is the result of nature fighting back. A disrespectful couple who retreat to the beach in order to salvage their marriage, face the full force of Mother Nature as she fights back after many careless acts occur, including starting fires from a cigarette and running over a kangaroo. The psychological intensity seen in this minimalist horror results in thinking about everything and nothing. Prepare yourself for a ‘kind of David Attenborough special gone wrong’.
Dubbed the Australian Hitchcock, Aussie filmmaker Richard Franklin brings Road Games, an outback thriller, to the screens with what was at the time, the most expensive film ever made in the nation. Featuring a sleep-deprived truck driver travelling from Melbourne to Perth who watches those on the roads and creates stories about each of them. However, he’s not your average truckie. With word of a murderer on the loose who is said to be butchering hitchhikers, he becomes obsessed with tracking him down. What could possibly go wrong?
Enter the game, the games of the ingenious villain – known as the Jigsaw Killer – who creates puzzles for both the victims and police, in Saw. The sadistic horrors experienced by the victims begins in a windowless, locked public toilet, where two men are chained to the walls by leg irons. Featuring a corpse, a gun and hacksaw lying on the floor between them, as well as a tape recording that orders the Doctor to kill Adam by six o’clock, otherwise his family will be murdered. The detectives, in a parallel story, face their own jigsaw to uncover the killer in time. Claimed to be ‘deliriously inventive and sadistically cruel’, enter at your own risk!
The Babadook (2014) The disturbing story of a difficult child and his widowed mother forms the mind-bending narrative of the horror film, The Babadook. This partly psychological thriller sees the little boy discover an odd book in his room featuring a top-hatted, expressionist-looking shadow called Babadook.
They spot a young survivor frantically rowing towards them from a sinking ship, who claims his crew died from a fatal disease.
Discover the violence and the true hell of the Australian outback in the film adaptation by Evan Jones of the 1961 novel by journalist and author Kenneth Cook , Wake In Fright. A discontent young teacher working in a remote community gets stuck in a brutal old mining town on the way to Sydney.
Box office success – long before iconic The Blair Witch Project – of Peter Weir’s haunting mystery is based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock. Although this fictional story suggests real-life happenings, you can’t help but get sucked into the stories questioning each of the events and facts that come up. At the beginning of the film, a group of schoolgirls vanish at the eponymous Victorian location without a trace; only one girl was found shortly later who cannot remember a whole lot, whilst the others were never heard from again. Frozen in time, the only possible explanation is of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem ‘all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.’
IFCFilmsVOD on YouTube. A 1976 murder of a police officer is the subject of this documentary, which reveals a great deal of corruption within the criminal justice system. It's available on Netflix and Hulu for streaming.
This film is based on an autobiography called Proved Innocent: The Story of Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson, and you can rent it on Amazon or iTunes.
Often when a wrongful conviction comes to light, you're hearing about it because a person is being exonerated for the crime which put them in jail. As exciting as it is that that person is finally receiving justice, it's infuriating that they were sent away for an act they didn't do.
In true crime, various echelons of the genre exist. There are the stories that make you disgusted by human nature and grateful for the criminal justice system. There are other cases that remain unsolved and make you muse over whodunit. And then, there are the tales of wrongful convictions that keep you up at night because you simply can't believe ...
This Harrison Ford movie tells the story of a man who must prove his innocence of a crime he was wrongly convicted of committing. As you can tell from the film's name, he's on the run from the police, and it's a race-for-your life story that you can't forget.
While this 1994 film suggests that its protagonist, Andy Dufresne, was actually innocent for the crime that put him in jail, some people believe that Andy was a master-manipulator who actually was guilty. The dubiousness of innocence vs. guilt is part of its greatness, though. You can rent it on Amazon or iTunes for $3.99.
The indictment accuses the three men of collectively causing Arbery's death "by unlawfully chasing him through the public roadways of the Satilla Shores neighborhood in pickup trucks and shooting him with a shotgun.". The indictment includes four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, and one count each ...
The indictment accuses the three men of collectively causing Arbery's death "by unlawfully chasing him through the public roadways of the Satilla Shores neighborhood in pickup trucks and shooting him with a shotgun."
In any jurisdiction within Australia, the maximum penalty for murder is life imprisonment ; this is the mandatory penalty in Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Under NSW law, the maximum penalty for murder is life imprisonment, with a standard non-parole period of 20 years, or 25 years for the murder of a child under the age of 18. In order to be found guilty of murder under the New South Wales Crimes Act 1900, intent to cause grievous bodily harm or reckless indifference to human life is sufficient ...
The relevant actus reus for murder is where an act (or omission) has caused death. The mens rea for murder is: an intent to kill; an intent to inflict grievous bodily harm; or. reckless indifference to human life, where the defendant foresaw the probability, as opposed to possibility, of his or her actions resulting in death.
The rule of law that provocation reduces the crime of murder to manslaughter is abolished. In assessing guilt for murder, the intention in the precise method in which death occurred is irrelevant as long as the requisite mens rea and actus reus is satisfied.
Murder shall be taken to have been committed where the act of the accused, or thing by him or her omitted to be done, causing the death charged, was done or omitted with reckless indifference to human life, or with intent to kill or inflict grievous bodily harm upon some person, or done in an attempt to commit, or during or immediately after the commission, by the accused, or some accomplice with him or her, of a crime...
Section 23 of the Crimes Act 1900 provides for the partial defence of provocation, and can refer to actions taken by the deceased both immediately before, and prior to, the murder.
However, because this provision of law uses mandatory language ('shall be imprisoned for life'), it clearly indicates that life imprisonment is thus the mandatory punishment for murder in South Australia.