Courtroom Scene Quotes

Even though he had lived in Monroe County his whole life, Walter McMillian had never heard of Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird. Monroeville, Alabama, celebrated its native daughter Lee shamelessly after her award-winning book became a national bestseller in the 1960s. She returned to Monroe County but secluded herself and was rarely seen in public. Her reclusiveness proved no barrier to the county’s continued efforts to market her literary classic—or to market itself by using the book’s celebrity. Production of the film adaptation brought Gregory Peck to town for the infamous courtroom scenes; his performance won him an Academy Award. Local leaders later turned the old courthouse into a “Mockingbird” museum. A group of locals formed “The Mockingbird Players of Monroeville” to present a stage version of the story. The production was so popular that national and international tours were organized to provide an authentic presentation of the fictional story to audiences everywhere. Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root.

You've seen him, I know. He's the guy who stands there, or sits in a scene, and never says anything. If you need five tough guys to sit in a car waiting to blast somebody coming out of a building, he's one of the five guys in the car. If some criminals are waiting to be tried by a judge in a courtroom scene, he's waiting to be tried and he always looks guilty. He stands by elevators, he eats lunch in restaurants. In westerns, he is the guy at the end of the bar drinking rye. Once in a while he carries the rope at a lynching.

I am not sure exactly what healing is or looks like, what form it comes in, what it should feel like. I do know that when I was four, I could not lift a gallon of milk, could not believe how heavy it was, that white sloshing boulder. I'd pull up a wooden chair to stand over the counting, pouring the milk with two shaking arms, wetting the cereal, spilling. Looking back I don't remember the day that I lifted it with ease. All I know is that now I do it without thinking, can do it one-handed, on the phone, in a rush. I believe the same rules apply, that one day I'll be able to tell this story without it shaking my foundation. Each time will not require an entire production, a spilling, a sweating forehead, a mess to clean up, sopping paper towels. It will just be a part of my life, every day lighter to lift. Ram Dass said, Allow that you are at this moment not in the wrong place in your life. Consider the possibility that there have been no errors in the game. Just consider it. Consider that there is not an error, and everything that's come down on your plate is the way it is and here we are. I don't believe it was my fate to be raped. But I do believe that here we are is all we have. For a long time, it was too painful to be here. My mind preferred to be dissociated. I used to believe the goal was forgetting. It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is returning repeatedly to forage something. Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place. I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving. If I got stuck inside scenes in the courtroom, I would glance down at Mogu and wonder, if I really am in the past, how did this blinking thing get in my house? I assembled and reassembled letters in ways that would describe what I'd seen and felt. As I revisited that landscape, I grew more in control, could go and go when I needed to. Until one day I found there was nothing left to gather.

She made one mistake,” he kept repeating. “She forgot to change her earrings. She has the same earrings on.” The prosecutor was so dramatic. The scene was straight out of the movies. You could tell he had been watching the late show. Both the woman in the bank and i had on hoop earrings. When Stanley summed up, he just said, “Will all the women in the courtroom who have on hoop earrings, please stand up?” Half the women rose to their feet.

In an improvised courtroom, the deserted town of Chernobyl’s own Palace of Culture played host to the last of the USSR’s show-trials. Soviet law required that the trial take place near the scene of the crime, and radiation provided a convenient excuse to limit the number of attendees, since access to the zone required special papers. Ostensibly an open trial with journalists and victims’ families invited to the opening and closing days, the bulk of the three-week proceedings took place in secret, behind closed doors. Charges brought against the defendants went back to the earliest days of the plant, when the test was supposed to have been conducted during commissioning, but also spanned routine disregard of safety regulations and failure to provide proper on-site training.

What does it mean truly, to be invisible? Her stillness, her ability to remain calm while high-decibel insults are hurled inches from her face and ears. To pretend nothing has been said. To pretend deafness. Or her chameleon's ability to blend in, a nondescript body in a dark blouse and black jeans leaning against the pay phone at the hospital waiting room, or standing outside the courtroom's double doors or by the fire engine at the crime scene, yellow do-not-cross tape isolating one place from its larger context. To pretend the oak tree across the street's steadfast patience, to pretend paralysis. To watch but pretend blindness. Never look anyone in the eye. Or maybe restraint. Knowing her lack of reaction is the only thing keeping her alive, over and again. Knowing the first time she hits back is the last time she'll ever have the opportunity to do so.

We were the last ones to file into the courtroom and I slid into a bench closest to the door. When the jury walked in and took their place, the room slowed like a movie scene as the judge asked the foreman, the bald black man, if the jury had reached a verdict.

Among his most interesting conclusions are the following: courtroom scenes focus on matters of status and hierarchy, which are paralleled in noncourtroom encounters between sages,62 and although we often view the rabbis as superior moral beings, the Talmud within the context of its legal narratives shows that they act as human beings concerned with their own best self-interests.63 To summarize, Kalmin and Hayes argue that the final editors of the Babylonian Talmud did not homogenize what they received in such a way as to make it impossible to discover the various streams of earlier thinking within the Talmud.

Pretty much. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, tragedy strikes, someone dies.” I shrugged, proud that I didn’t feel any heat creeping up my cheeks to give me away. “Throw in some legal courtroom drama, a little unsatisfying but poetic sex, and maybe a beach scene, and you’ve pretty much got it. If that’s your thing, you can’t go wrong with either book.

The first nonpartisans to observe the crime scene were the cops who arrived within seconds of the blast. And they immediately determined that Jack Dylan had murdered Bart Breitner. Things do not look good for Jack; things do not look good at all.

Your objection is sustained, Mr. Blake. Please refrain from using the words ‘crime’ and/or ‘crime scene,’ Mr. Weaver. These terms call for a legal conclusion that the evidence has not yet established.” Zack almost laughed out loud at Judge Shipley’s ruling on his objection. The jury just heard the trial judge say that there had been insufficient evidence offered, thus far, to establish murder.

Well, if it isn’t Sleeping Beauty, back from the dead. I’ve never had a killer take a nap at the murder scene before.

ROZ: My sister and I became guarded with each other in the weeks and months after our mother died. I don’t think either of us had a handle on what it was about, but I, in my characteristic way, was eager to roll up my sleeves and iron out some issues with her. She, less given to argument, preferred to keep her distance. Many is the time I drove through the streets of Boston presenting my case in the most cogent terms to a full courtroom just beyond the dashboard, while she was safely closeted a state away. My birthday came and went and still we had not managed to get together; of course I felt all the more put upon. Finally I had the grace to ask myself, “What’s happening here?” and I caught a glimpse of the in-between. All the energy I had been expending to shape a persuasive argument was actually propelling us apart. And I missed her—acutely. I thought that if I could just see her we surely could find some solutions. So I called her, and invited myself to her house for breakfast, and got up in the dark and was down in Connecticut by seven. There in the kitchen in her nightgown I found her, looking like my favorite sister in all the world. We talked gaily while we drank black Italian coffee, and then we took a long morning walk down the leafy dirt roads of Ashford, Connecticut, while her chocolate Lab, Chloe, ran ahead and came back, ran ahead and came back, in long arcs of perpetual motion. What did we talk about? The architecture, and the countryside, and the cats that Chloe was eager to visit at the farm ahead. We revisited scenes featuring our hilarious mother. We talked about my work, and about a paper she was about to present. My “case” never came up; it must have gotten lost somewhere along that wooded road because by the time I got in the car—my courtroom, my favorable jury—it was no longer on the docket. Did we resolve the issues? Obviously not, but the issues themselves are rarely what they seem, no matter what pains are taken to verify the scoreboard. We walked together, moved our arms, became joyous in the sunlight, and breathed in the morning. At that moment there were no barriers between us. And from that place, I felt our differences could easily be spoken. My disagreements with my sister were but blips on our screen compared to the hostilities individuals and nations are capable of when anger, fear, and the sense of injustice are allowed to develop unchecked. “Putting things aside” then becomes quite a different matter. At the apex of desperation and rage, we need a new invention to see us through.

Crime scene techs determined that Breitner had escaped underground, through a sewer drain below the warehouse. Smart move, asshole; you planned this escape and let the others take the fall. I will hunt you down, tough guy. I will find you…

A half-hour later, Zack, Micah and Matt Jordan, Micah’s crime scene specialist, were standing in the lobby of Manistee police headquarters, waiting for Alexander. “What’s he like?” Micah asked. “A little to the right of Buford T. Justice,” replied Zack, referencing Jackie Gleason’s classic portrayal of a country cop in Smokey and the Bandit. “I love Buford T. Justice. If I were an actor and I could choose to play only one part, it would be Buford T. Justice.” “Great role, Micah, but Buford is not the type of cop you want if you are trying to prove your client’s innocence.” “Suppose not.” A door opened, and Alexander walked out into the lobby. Micah started chuckling. Buford T. Justice! “What’s so funny?” Chief Alexander asked.

The lawsuit was also a major distraction to Evan, Bobby, and Snapchat, during a time when they needed to focus more than ever. Finally, they reached a settlement. Reggie would receive $ 157.5 million and sign a gag order to never speak about Snapchat, the founding, or the lawsuit. Snapchat would acknowledge Reggie’s contributions to the company. Like Facebook’s multiple lawsuits with the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin, it’s difficult to neatly arrange the characters into winner and loser columns. Reggie Brown likely could not have built Snapchat into the multibillion-dollar company it is today. But he did not simply toss an idea out there for anyone to take—he recruited Evan, the best person he knew for the task, to join him and start the company. So what is fair for each side to receive? Snapchat’s valuation soared so high and so quickly during the lawsuit that it was hard for each side to wrap their heads around it, let alone arbitrate what each side deserved. This question isn’t going away. The Social Network, featuring courtroom scene after courtroom scene of friends hurling accusations at each other through expensive lawyers, spurred scores of young college students to pursue startups. Evan’s massive success with Snapchat has only increased the startup fervor on Stanford’s campus. And Reggie’s lawyers’ firm, Lee Tran & Liang, has become the hot law firm for ousted startup cofounders to sue young tech companies.

Nick woke with a start, but waking up didn't end the nightmare. It never did. Because he hadn't invented the scene in the courtroom; it had really happened. And Steven Macklin, the man who was convicted of murder wasn't an imaginary character he'd dreamed up. He was Nick's father.