The Case for Art – Legal Re-enactment In Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood

In the judicial realm, re-enactment is a procedure in which actions allegedly performed during the execution of a crime are reproduced. It is an attempt to restage a crime in order to understand its causal sequence, demonstrate or refute a hypothesis, confirm eyewitness accounts, or demonstrate technical and material impossibilities. The re-enactment is illustrative, as it gives a tangible dimension to situations that either were not seen or were difficult to understand because of indeterminate perceptual conditions or due to cognitive processes troubled by emotion and violence. Sometimes it is meant to restore the original nature of an action altered by subsequent media coverage. Judicial re-enactment is a “theatre of justice,” to use François Niney’s term.1 1  - François Niney, L’épreuve du réel à l’écran: essai sur le principe de réalité documentaire (Brussels: De Boeck, 2002), 274. Acted out, or even simulated through computer-generated audiovisuals,2 2  - Several businesses specializing in the re-enactment of on-the-job and traffic accidents offer their services to victims bringing civil lawsuits. These high-cost computer-generated graphic reconstructions aim to impress the opposing parties with their strong demonstrative power. See, for example, http://legalarsenal.com/. it has high demonstrative value and can become a powerful means of persuasion in the courtroom. Judicial re-enactment is part of the lawyer’s and the prosecutor’s rhetorical arsenal, a means of convincing the jury through a symbolic replication of the crime. “This repetition of the crime, through language and emotion,” explains Antoine Garapon, “is experienced by those in attendance as an authentic ritual commemoration.”3 3  - Antoine Garapon, Bien juger: Essai sur le rituel judiciaire (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob), 64. (Our translation; emphasis added.) I emphasize these words because they fully convey the paradox of legal re-enactments: to show, to display, to translate into gesture and images, to orchestrate a return to the crime, to introduce this chaos into a putatively beneficial public ceremony, while at the same time exposing a sadly factual treatment of things, weighing the weight of the real, evaluating the likelihood of events.

There have been some notable legal re-enactments, such as that of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in which the desire to produce an intelligible picture of events was combined with the goal of establishing an official version. In this case, the scientific nature of the demonstration was less of a concern than was the desire to imprint a definite image of the events in people’s memory. This is the opinion of Chuck Marler and others who have examined the various reconstructions of the assassination. On May 24, 1964, on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the Warren Commission lawyers organized a re-enactment of the events with the stated intention of shedding light on specific points: the precise moment when the bullets struck JFK and Texas governor John Connally, the position and speed of the limousine when the bullets struck, the bullets’ trajectory from the sixth floor of the schoolbook repository, and on-site validation of visual content in the amateur film produced by Abraham Zapruder. In truth, the re-enactment’s main objective was apparently to validate the theory that the assassination was the work of a single man, Lee Harvey Oswald thus playing a crucial role in legitimizing the “single bullet theory.”⁴ 4 - Chuck Marler, “The JFK Assassination Reenactment: Questioning the Warren Commission’s Evidence,” in Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK, ed. James H. Fetzer (Peru, IL: Catfeet Press and Open Court, 1998), 249–262. It becomes demonstrably obvious that a legal re-enactment is open to question and cannot in itself constitute an irrefutable representation of the facts. The art collectives Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco eloquently showed as much early on, through a burlesque reconstruction of the assassination — The Eternal Frame (1975) — produced on the very site of the event.