‘The dramatic idea of justice’: wrongful conviction, documentary television, and The Court of Last Resort

Abstract

This article explores the history of a little-known, true crime television program from the late 1950s entitled The Court of Last Resort. Initially, the program’s creators had hoped to produce the show as a series of investigative documentaries exploring individual cases of wrongful conviction, but practical industrial concessions forced them to hire actors, fictionalize the real stories and compromise with an esthetic that they called ‘fiction with the illusion of reality.’ The producers had hoped that this style would be a sort of provocative mimesis in which viewers would still be able to see the social reality underlying the recreation, but ‘fiction with the illusion of reality’ ultimately had ethical and ideological implications regarding how truth was to be represented in wrongful conviction narratives, cases where truth is already obscured. Authenticity is particularly vital to the representation of subjects in these cases because wrongful conviction narratives are fundamentally about uncovering hidden truths. And yet, The Court of Last Resort’s scripted format produced an ontologically confused object: although certain formal elements tried to evoke the real-world referent from which these stories were to have been drawn, the end result obscured this connection and troubled any claims it might have made to represent ‘authentic’ stories of injustice.