Artistic License Law: Difference between revisions

'''Homestar Runner''': Sustained! (hits self in face with gavel)|''[[Homestar Runner]]''}}

* [[High Altitude Interrogation]]: The one interrogation method that is ''worse'' than [[Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique]]. Rather than torture someone, this takes awful interrogation [[Incredibly Lame Pun|to new heights]] by threatening to ''kill'' the potential informer. Unlike in fiction, threatening to kill the [[Mooks|mook]] who has inside knowledge of the [[Big Bad|Big Bad's]] activities means that you're willing to follow through with that should he be non-compliant, but unless you have other people in custody that would likely know the same information who you can interrogate, too, you would unsurprisingly be ending any chance of attaining that knowledge as well as any chance of uncovering new leads to follow if he's killed. Dead men can't tell tales, after all. Even if it's meant as an empty threat, the informer might think that his interrogator would kill him, anyway, which would also make him much less willing to cooperate.

* [[Sued for Superheroics]]: Sometimes an aversion, as ''they'' would be sued in [[Real Life]]

** When this trope is invoked by non-insane defendants on police procedurals it's often to avoid a potentially worse sentence (like the death penalty). This is generally [[Truth in Television]] - the majority of insanity defense are used in murder cases.

*** The "Scots Verdict," "Not Proven, has been translated as "Not Guilty and Don't Do It Again." (It has the same legal effect as an acquittal but perhaps allows the jury to feel better about it.) People have been know to appeal the "not proven" verdict because the stigma attached.

*** Common Law assumes Innocent unless proven Guilty: you must be proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. Civil Law assumes the balance of probabilities; if you probably done it, then, you are liable. [[Mary Queen of Scots]] tried to impose the Civil Law on Scotland and the compromise was the Scots Verdict: "Ye probably done it, but there is nae enough evidence tae hang ye."

* [[Off on a Technicality]]: [[Truth in Television]] again, less often than a lot of people realize, and mostly at the appeal level than in the original trial. At that, most fictional examples of this trope show it happening much more frequently and for reasons that would never stand in a real trial, oftening involving dismissing evidence through a grand misappropriation of Miranda Rights.

*** This is one of the few law tropes ''[[Law & Order|Law and Order]]'' gets right every time they invoke it.

** And don't get me started on Brazil, possibly the biggest aversion to this trope ever. Due to the lack, until very recently, of Erga Omnes<ref>basically, the power to make a decision be binding for all similar cases</ref> in supreme court decisions in Brazil, any judgment or 'precedent' made by the court was valid only for that specific case only! So virtually anyone who had the money and patience could and would keep making appeals all the way up to the supreme court. And why would they want to do that, you might ask? Simple: if you're not on trial for a violent crime or haven't been convicted of a previous one, you don't have to go jail until your final appeal... which can take over a decade. Somtimes, allowing for enough time to pass and the stature of limitations to kick in. [http://www.stf.jus.br/portal/cms/verTexto.asp?servico=estatistica&pagina=movimentoProcessual No wonder the court judges over 100.000 cases per annum]!

## If someone has been successfully framed for a serious crime, they most likely aren't free to investigate it. They're in jail.

## To the legal system, ''why'' you committed a crime is utterly irrelevant. Having a good reason doesn't get you any points unless, say, it gets murder knocked down to involuntary manslaughter.