When Does Justice Become ‘True Crime’ Spectacle?
John Bowie, LawFuel publisher
Scandalous criiminal trials have long been the stuff of entertainment and intrigue, but the question of who holds the moral compass when it comes to making popcorn from popular crime is something that is an increasing issue, most recently highlighted with an Auckland Law Society literary soiree featuring the darling of the criminal reporting circuit, Steve Braunias.
The Braunias style has long blured the boundary between legal reportage and social satire dipping his pen one moment into treacle and the next into acid.
Polkinghorne as Spectacle
Braunias is to front the Society’s event on November 19 to discuss Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century. The invitation boasts “operatic” courtroom drama, “lusts and torments,” and has baited the hook with the steamy scandal and behind-the-curtains ‘Remuera Confidential’ look.
Family court lawyer Louise Meredith found the hype less than collegial and suggested the profession ought to project a little gravity rather than a cabaret act for murder trials.
But Braunias is no stranger to the accusation of trivialising the sombre. Across cases from Grace Millane to Polkinghorne, the fire-lighting case that lead to his book on the trial and his wall-to-wall courtroom observations during the case.
The boundary between tastefulness and tack is a narrow one and is trod frequently by writers, producers and lawyers.
There are plenty of examples and we have the recent debate around the tragedy of Tom Phillips’ family, now the subject of Linda Clark’s super injunction, but is nonetheless the subject of a supposedly binge-worthy television outing.
We have cases in the UK like Fred and Rose West, the Moors Murder and the US has whole channels dedicated to this necro-focused murder-tainment. OJ Simpson, Ted Bundy, the Menendez Brothers and on they go.
As junior counsel lasst century in the Alf Benning murder trial, involving the murder of Benning’s wife in Karori, a parallel comes sharply into focus. The Benning case saw a husband murder his wife Betty, only for the pervasive shock to be later recast as parody in the darkly comic telemovie, How to Murder Your Wife.
Despite the gravity of the crime and the courtroom drama that ensued, the story migrated via television script to Monty Python-esque set pieces, replete with knowing winks, absurdity, and, most tellingly, the refusal of Wellington’s High Court to allow its halls to be used for filming the comic interpretation. For many, this approach crossed a line: distaste, disrespect, and the uneasy sense that real pain was being packaged for a midweek audience.
Yet the discomfort lingers. Does comic rendering of murder erode the seriousness with which justice (and injustice) ought to be treated, or does it, perversely, invite wider engagement with law and its limitations?
Law, Laughter, and the Line We Draw
Events like the Law Society’s Polkinghorne session sit on the border between necessary reflection and the lure of the spectacle. They beg the profession and the public to revisit the uneasy truce between legal reality, popular storytelling, and the moral obligations that bind them.
As was the case with Benning, and is now with Polkinghorne, there is no escaping that true crime, when retold, tests the boundaries of taste, respect and truth.
The veneer of respectability is governed by the fact that it’s not exploitation, it’s “examining society’s darkness” or “giving voice to the victims”, who coincidentally can’t object to their trauma being repackaged with dramatic recreations and a Rotten Tomatoes score.
It’s exploitation with a very, very small focus on the ‘e’ – unless that stands for entertainment.
