call. who answered the phone? michael george. how long did you talk to the defendants? less than five minutes. what time did you call the defendant? 5:15 to 5:45. do you remember how he seemed to you? like he was in a hurry. how important is he to your case? without michael we cannot place the defendant physically in the store close to the time of barbara s shooting. then came a routine moment we have all seen in courtroom dramas on the tv. the defense response in this michigan courtroom just as predictably is to try to get the case to be thrown out, asking a judge for a directed verdict. when you just don t know you
and forth to john. but he did love her. i told some people at the clinic, i wish i had someone that would look at me the way john looks at susan. the question for the jury was, did he love her to death? the motive was love lost. hello and welcome to dateline. if you re a fan of fictional courtroom dramas, you might think that every criminal trial ends with a bombshell. maybe it s a surprise witness or an 11th hour confession. well, that kind of thing rarely happens in a real trial, but it did in this story. one last unexpected twist in a case full of surprises. here s dennis murphy with the valentine s day mystery. a dozen roses check. how about a candlelit dinner and a champagne toast to love?
and remember, the committee vote is just one step, the committee can always say to mr. bannon, look, you know, the fact that we re voting today doesn t mean you re going to jail tomorrow. there will be time enough to continue to negotiate, but we re not staying off step one of the ladder just because it might eventually lead to steps two and three. we want to move forward. spoking of going to jail. in a real courtroom, don t we sometimes see, i don t think this is just on the courtroom dramas that we watch. don t we sometimes see a noncompliant witness who is held in contempt of court marched off to a jail cell? we do see that. what you re talking about witnessing, though, is typically civil content. what mr. bannon is facing is a charge of criminal contempt that would carry it would carry
i do understand courtroom dramas are full of things that never happen in real courtrooms, like people producing witnesses out of nowhere that nobody s heard of, people presenting papers ijust happen to have in my bag. i quite like a courtroom drama too, you see. yeah, i m a suckerfor it. i keep expecting somebody to slam the table and say, you can t handle the truth! if you accept that the drama itself is fairly contrived and it does have all those conventions, then i think it s very entertaining. but more importantly, it is about something very serious. it is about that thing of looking back into the past, looking back into a country s guilty past and your own family s guilty past and asking questions about whether people are the people that they seem to be. so it s doing quite a clever thing which is it s a very entertaining pot boiler on one hand but also, its about something far more substantial. as i said, i haven t read the book, but i very much enjoyed the film. it s called
it s a courtroom drama. now, i love a courtroom drama, i do understand that courtroom dramas are full of things that never happen in real courtrooms, like people producing witnesses out of nowhere that nobody s heard of, people presenting papers ijust happen to have in my bag. i quite like a courtroom drama too, you see, so. but. yeah, i m a suckerfor it. i keep expecting somebody to slam the table and say, you can t handle the truth! if you accept that the drama itself is fairly contrived and it does, you know, have all those conventions, then i think it s very entertaining. but more importantly, it is about something very serious. it is about that thing of looking back into the past, looking back into a country s guilty past and your own family s guilty past and asking questions about whether people are the people that they seem to be. so it s doing quite a clever thing which is it s a very entertaining pot boiler on one hand but also, it s about something far more substantial. a