Murder on a Sunday Morning
Faced with the murder of a white tourist Jacksonville police officers literally pick up the first black male they see and charge him with the crime. Their investigation ends there, and they eventually beat a confession out of the alleged murderer, a fifteen year-old boy on his way to Blockbuster to drop off a job application.
As the defenses attorneys do the investigation the detectives should have, they begin to uncover gaping holes in the prosecution’s case. The purse, for example is found nearly ten miles away from scene of the crime, which implies that the assailant killed the woman, snatched the purse, ran ten miles away from the scene of the crime, ditched the purse in a trash can without removing the $1200 inside, then ran ten miles back to the scene of the crime just in time to be arrested by the officers on the scene.
The epilog on the DVD notes that the defense attorney eventually uncovered the real culprit. If you think racism in the US is a thing of the past, you need to watch this movie.
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2 Comments
wow, that’s amazing, and very sad… if it is true.
On the one hand it definitely seemed as if the documentarian was on the side of the arrested boy and not so sympathetic to the cops. On the other hand it also seemed clear that the cops were interested in closing a case rather than doing a full investigation.
I am sympathetic to the hard work and low pay of Florida’s police, and astonished the overwhelming majority of Floridians want to cut their pay and increase their workload. Their lack of professionalism, however, is inexcusable. Given that it’s so much easier to railroad someone through the system than to do the hard work of investigation (something for which there is neither the manpower nor the money) I wonder how many other people are in jail simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I suppose all the info at the trial is public, so you could do the research if so inclined.
In the subsequent civil suit the family was awarded $775,000 and Brenton Butler now attends Fordham where he plays on the basketball team. He wrote a book about his experience called “They Said It Was Murder.”