Errol Morris, “The Thin Blue Line” (1988)
Originally intended to be a documentary about another person who appears briefly in the film, “The Thin Blue Line” is an investigation into how an innocent man was convicted of the murder of a police officer and sentenced to death despite almost overwhelming evidence pointing to another person by a criminal justice system operated by incompetence and stupidity. In 1976 a drifter, Randall Adams, rolls into Dallas with his brother and a couple of days later meets a 16-year-old boy, David Harris, who offers him a lift in his car. (Adams does not know that Harris stole the car.) The unlikely pair smoke some grass, watch a drive-in movie and drive off. A police patrol car pursues the two as the car’s headlights are off. Both cars stop and one of the police officers, Robert Woods, approaches Harris and Adams. Stopping by the driver’s side of the car, Woods is immediately shot several times and falls to the ground, dying. Harris and Adams immediately race off while Woods’ partner fires at them.
The film examines the police investigation of Woods’ murder and Adams’ arrest and trial, based largely on interviews with Adams, Harris, Adams’ defence lawyers, various Dallas police officers and witnesses. The narrative is driven entirely by recollections and testimonies of the interviewees who reveal their biases and prejudices against Adams or shoot holes in the evidence that was presented in the original murder trial. Re-enactments of the murder scene, repeated over and over in a fragmented way, underline what the interviewees say until viewers can almost believe they themselves are watching Woods’ actual murder. Newspaper clippings interspersed between interviews help to delineate aspects of the murder, Adams’ arrest and charge of murder and his subsequent trial and further treatment by the Dallas justice system.
The film does not condemn its interviewees but forces viewers to make their own judgements about them. The detectives are hungry to wrap up and close a murder case that’s dragged on for too long for lack of credible evidence – because the murder took place late at night and Woods’ partner could not remember the details of the stolen car accurately – before the Christmas season. The police determine very quickly who they believe to be responsible for killing one of their own and shape the evidence to fit their beliefs and narrative to the extent that the real murderer escapes and goes on a crime spree for several years. The judge wants to retire with his reputation for sending the right people to jail 100% intact. Two witnesses perjure themselves in court because their daughter is going on trial a week after Adams’ trial and they need money. The prosecuting psychiatrist Dr Grigson is keen to maintain his reputation for helping to send riff-raff to the electric chair. Self-interest on the part of most people who were involved, even in minor ways – the stenographer who takes down Adams’ testimony changes it when typing up his statement (suggesting that s/he is either eager or compelled to conform to the detectives’ say-so) – piles up incrementally until the sum of it takes on a life of its own and an innocent man falls into the maw of an indifferent bureaucracy from which he may never escape.
The film questions the role and accuracy of memory and the importance attributed to eyewitness accounts by the US and Texas legal systems of the time. In 1976, the techniques and methods of criminal investigation were still quite crude and liable to error by current (2014) standards. Police and courts depended much more on eyewitness accounts and in this dependence, Morris shows how the culture of Texas, its prejudices towards outsiders like Adams, the casual racism and the mediocrity such a culture encouraged and bred in people become a running commentary underlying Adams’ case. The thin blue line that the police supposedly represent between order in society and anarchy becomes a thin line between truth and justice on the one hand and lies and corruption on the other. Ironically in questioning such aspects of the Robert Woods murder case, the film itself becomes subjective and subjectivity becomes one of its dominant themes.
Although quite dry and perhaps lacking in energy, the film feels tight and focused. Its style is noirish and the re-enactment scenes might have come straight out of a David Lynch film. The interviewees are not portrayed in flattering ways yet neither do they come across as idiots. One can see how a culture of conformity and prejudice can bear down on individuals and influence their beliefs and behaviours. Though David Harris turns out to be a loathsome psychopath without remorse, an event from his childhood and his description of the relationships within his family illuminate the inner trauma and torment that led him into a life of violence and his eventual execution in 2004 for another murder. We can only wonder at the kind of person he might have turned out to be had his family not suffered the tragedy of his brother’s drowning at the age of four or if they had all received the appropriate counselling after the child’s death.
“The Thin Blue Line” was to have an impact on the way crime documentaries are made and also on the case of Randall Adams himself: the film led to the overturning of his conviction and his release from jail. Adams wrote a book about the trial and became a protester against the death penalty. Dr Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association for unethical conduct of the type that Adams describes in the film when he discusses the way in which Grigson interviewed and tested him, and then testified in court over the likelihood of future criminal behaviour. Since the film was originally meant to be about Grigson, I’ll end this review with him.