Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (2001)
On Sunday 7 May 2000 James and Mary Ann Stephens, a couple in their sixties from Georgia, had breakfast in the Ramada Inn in Jacksonville, Florida, where they were staying. On their way back to their room they were accosted by a gunman, who demanded Mrs Stephens’ bag. Before she could hand it over, the man shot her in the face, killing her instantly. The murderer was a young African-American and, within a few hours, a black teenager called Brenton Butler, on his way to submit a job application to a Blockbuster Video store, had been picked up on the street by the Jacksonville police and identified by Mr Stephens as the man who shot his wife. By the end of the same day, the police had a statement from Butler, confessing to the murder. According to Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s film, there was no other incriminating evidence: the gun wasn’t found; there was no forensic evidence to implicate Butler (or anyone else, since the police chose to ignore the discovery of Mrs Stephens’ purse several miles away); no other witnesses saw fifteen-year-old Butler around the Ramada Inn at 7.30am that day and his parents insisted he was around at home then; the boy had no history of violence, shown no signs of any propensity to violence. Through photographs of Butler’s bruised face and chest, his legal team was able to substantiate their claim that the defendant, who’d insisted he was innocent when first taken into custody, was physically assaulted by a homicide detective in order to extract an admission of guilt. The case went to trial later in 2000 and the verdict was returned a couple of days before Thanksgiving. It took the jury only forty-five minutes to find Brenton Butler not guilty.
Murder on a Sunday Morning is a remarkable piece of film-making. Because it’s largely on videotape I was surprised it technically qualified as cinema and that it won Jean-Xavier de Lestrade the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2002 but it’s good that it did. Lestrade follows Patrick McGuinness and Ann Finney, two attorneys from the public defender’s office, as they construct their defence of Brenton Butler. I wish I knew how this project got off the ground but it provides footage which is really extraordinary: parts of a crime investigation which normally have to be reconstruction are the real thing here. There is, for example, an early case meeting – of the defence lawyers, the prosecutor from the state attorney’s office, and one of the policemen who picked up Butler. (The meeting is designed to clarify the circumstances of his arrest and identification by James Stephens.) Then there are the scenes of Butler’s parents visiting him in his cell – enough in themselves to expose the falsity of the police claim that, when Butler first saw Detective Michael Glover, the black detective who later assaulted him, the teenager exclaimed, ‘Am I glad to see you!’ and hugged Glover. Even in these deeply emotional meetings with his parents, Butler doesn’t show his feelings in that kind of way. The actual court proceedings are fascinating to a degree I’ve never found in the excerpts we see on the news of American TV coverage of high profile trials like those of O J Simpson and, in recent weeks, Michael Jackson’s doctor. Lestrade’s calm, skilful organisation of the material suggests objectivity; in fact, he’s highly and unambiguously partisan. The tension between the two approaches is compelling – or was for this viewer anyway: I didn’t know the outcome of the trial.
Lestrade inserts into the chronological sequence of events interviews with Pat McGuinness and Ann Finney which were evidently shot after the trial (or, at least, after their questioning of particular witnesses at the trial). McGuinness, in these bits, is quietly, eloquently angry and, since it seems increasingly incredible that Brenton Butler had anything to do with Mrs Stephens’ murder, I started to get a sinking feeling. I began to suspect that – because a dramatic twist was needed to eclipse a predictable not guilty verdict – the jury (with roughly equal numbers of black and white jurors) was going to reach an outrageous conclusion. In the event, the relief you feel when the verdict is read out is so strong that a sense of anti-climax is the furthest thing from your mind. But there is a twist or, at least, a surprising development after Brenton Butler has gone home to his family, and it’s this that makes Murder on a Sunday Morning stand out from most other accounts of people falsely accused of serious crimes. In his closing address to the jury, Pat McGuinness reminds them that, thanks to the deeply flawed police investigation, the real killer has still not been caught. In the moment he says these words, you receive them as a shrewd, rhetorical manoeuvre but you realise after the trial that he’s really troubled by this. (It’s a main reason – along with the appalling experience Butler and his family have been subjected to – why the triumphant McGuinness still exudes anger in that post-trial interview.) And he does something about it. As a result of McGuinness’s efforts, Juan Curtis was eventually convicted of the murder of Mary Ann Stephens[1].
The focus on the defence attorney here naturally reminded me of the 2004 TV documentary mini-series Death on the Staircase, whose central character, David Rudolf, defended Michael Peterson, on trial for the murder of his wife. It turns out that Lestrade made that film too; the combination of the somewhat familiar technique and the fact that Peterson was convicted must have contributed to my apprehension that Brenton Butler was also going to be found guilty. From what I remember of Death on the Staircase, I was impressed by and rooting for Rudolf but unable to decide whether I thought Peterson was guilty or innocent. The piece ran 360 minutes all told so this kind of uncertainty was pretty essential if you were going to be kept intrigued. Murder on a Sunday Morning, which lasts a little under two hours, is quite different and part of me kept thinking: this is gripping but it isn’t complex enough. The policemen in the witness box are physically repulsive as well as scumbags (especially Detective Duane Darnell, the one who penned Butler’s confession). The close-knit, deeply religious Butler family are heroic (and both the parents are good-looking). Racist members of the audience may also be grumbling, mentally at least, ‘I bet they wouldn’t make a film about a white youth charged with shooting a black woman’. But the post-trial events confound these kinds of reservation and prejudice. Ann Finnell is a formidable, likeable presence throughout but McGuinness – burly, chain-smoking, competitive, acerbically witty – is the star. (If they ever make a fictional version of the case, Philip Seymour Hoffman would have to play him.) By the end of the film, because justice has been done twice, he’s an authentic hero.
10 November 2011
[1] The events subsequent to the Butler trial are summarised on Wikipedia as follows: ‘After Butler’s acquittal, his attorneys tipped the Sheriff’s Office to two other suspects, Juan Curtis and Jermel Williams. Williams pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and testified against his co-defendant at the trial; he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Curtis’ fingerprints were found on the victim’s purse, which had been recovered after the crime but had never been tested. The Butler case figured into the new trial; the judge allowed Curtis’ lawyers to discuss the eye-witness identification, but ruled that Florida’s evidence laws forbade them from using Butler’s confession. Curtis was subsequently found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. However, in 2004 appeals court found that the exclusion of the confession denied Curtis’ constitutional right to a fair trial, and granted a retrial. At this second trial Curtis was found guilty and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.’
