CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new documentary takes a lighthearted approach to a very serious subject: the numerous ways the government and corporations have stripped ordinary citizens of their right to a jury trial.
“The Best Justice System in the World” is a new film by Suja Thomas, the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It will have its world premiere Nov. 15 at the DOC NYC Film Festival.
Throughout its 88-minute runtime, the film explores the popular conception of the U.S. justice system as the “best” in the world and aims to explode myths about the criminal and civil justice systems, including how many cases make it to jury trial.
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“We have this perception of the U.S. justice system that is based on what we see in movies and on TV where the system appears just,” Thomas said. “What I want people to take away from the film is that the U.S. justice system has some very severe flaws, and, in the film, we expose those flaws — with humor.”
A vanishingly small number of juries decide cases in the U.S. justice system, said Thomas, who is also the author of the 2016 book “The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries.”
“What the public doesn’t know is that juries decide a very small percent of criminal and civil cases,” she said. “People plead guilty around 97% of the time, sometimes to crimes they didn’t commit. People do so because prosecutors threaten people with much more time in prison if they take a jury trial. It’s coercing people to plead guilty based on this penalty for taking a case to trial. So even though the jury is a huge part of the public’s popular conception of the courts and our legal system, the jury is actually a small part of our criminal justice system, and about half of the film is devoted to telling stories about this problem.”
The film also covers two procedures from the civil justice side: summary judgment and arbitration.
“Under both arbitration and summary judgment, only one person decides your fate, not a jury of your peers,” Thomas said.
The film spotlights the stories of six individuals with firsthand experience of the enfeebled jury trial system, including a high school student who was threatened with life in prison if he exercised his right to a jury trial, and was thus coerced to plead guilty before being ultimately exonerated 13 years later.
“In addition, we feature cases where there are terrible facts of discrimination and harassment, where the cases never go to trial, where judges dismiss them or the cases are in arbitration. Instead, a jury could and should decide whether there is discrimination or harassment,” Thomas said.
The film has been a labor of love for Thomas, taking nearly 10 years on its journey from idea to screen.
“I have been working on issues in the justice system for a long time, first as a lawyer and then as a law professor,” she said. “During that time, I have written articles, books and made many public appearances, including on public radio and podcasts, to draw attention to what I thought were very serious issues with the justice system. Because I wasn’t reaching the broad audience that I wanted, I decided to make a film.”
Although the documentary tackles an extremely serious subject matter, Thomas’ approach is decidedly not-so-serious, which is evident from the tone of the film’s trailer.
“The idea for the documentary is I wanted to do something similar to the style of Michael Moore, where you have this serious subject matter but you have the audience laughing, including regarding the absurdity inherent to the system,” Thomas said. “You’ll see me dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and engaging in interviews about our justice system with people on the street. People want to learn, but they also want to be entertained.”
