Nampara

The unsung hero of the season finale was the underappreciated Ding Dong -- constantly taking a hit for the team. "Let me explain it to you." *Punch in nose.* "Oh, you want a finder's fee?" *Punch in nose.* "You mean Goo Goo stood us up?!" *Punch in nose (and elsewhere).*

That much is true. But it's not because of the prosecution's concern that the alleged resurrection could somehow be brought up at trial. It's because of the probable change in the public's mood regarding the case and Emily as the defendant (outrage replaced by skepticism and sympathy), worry about wasting resources (murder trials are expensive), political calculations at the DA's office (no one wants to be associated with a losing cause), and, as you note, a clear demonstration in hand that the evidence the DA has at his disposal is insufficient to secure a conviction.

1. Stealing a corpse after the body has been identified, an autopsy has been performed, a coroner's report as to cause of death has been prepared and filed, a burial has taken place, etc., does not prevent a murder trial from going forward. It's just a separate crime -- grave robbing. Arguing that "there's no body!" works only if the alleged homicide victim's body was never found, so that it's plausible that death didn't actually occur. "Someone dug up my baby, so I couldn't have murdered him," is an illogical and legally frivolous argument. 2. Emily testified in her first trial about how her son's murder and death destroyed her. It would be impossible to recant all that. Any testimony to the effect of, "Oops, I guess I was wrong and good ol' Charlie isn't dead after all," would be a complete joke. And no competent judge would allow a stunt like pointing to a baby on someone's lap and claiming it's the deceased. 3. Even if the law recognized fantastical claims about resurrection, as a matter of logic, an alleged resurrection would not preclude a charge of homicide for having caused the death in the first place. I.e., you first have to kill someone for them to be "resurrected" months later. Reanimation in some ghoulish way doesn't get the accused off the hook.

The law doesn't recognize resurrection. Charlie Dodson was legally declared dead, so he stays dead. The fact that his mother later shows up with another infant is irrelevant. The reasons for not retrying Emily after the mistrial are practical; there is no need to prove or disprove anything about the replacement baby.

The church was not irrelevant, since its financial condition was the true cause of the kidnapping. You are right, however, that the character of Sister Alice, especially in all the biographical and psychological detail lavished upon her, was inessential to the core story. She provided color and texture to the drama, but that's it.

Even by the standard of highly abbreviated closing arguments in movies and TV shows, the prosecution's closing here was laughably bad. It basically conceded, "I ain't got nothing, but she's a dirty woman!" You're right that the cross-ex of Emily was also very weak. Barnes should have taken full advantage of the opportunity to attack Emily's credibility across the board. He should have implied to the jurors that they would have every right not to believe her testimony that she had nothing to do with, and indeed was completely unaware of, the kidnapping plot. The fact that no one talked about the risks of cross-examination when the defense team was debating whether to put Emily on the stand was incredibly unrealistic. That's always the most important consideration.

The noir-ish deconstruction of Perry Mason the show, and Perry Mason the lawyer, has reached its zenith. Not only is Mason a crooked lawyer in the sense of possessing fabricated credentials, he's now a crooked lawyer in the most fundamental way, through bribing a juror. (A felony, in case there is any doubt about that.) Why make such a big deal about Paul Drake's payoff-proof conscience when the show's protagonist leans the other way? And not only is the old TV program's admittedly rather preposterous convention of last-minute confessions by witnesses openly mocked, the big show trial can't even yield a verdict, let alone an acquittal. I guess the legal process in this universe, like right and wrong in a noir, is always inconclusive and hazy. HamBurger continues his unethical conduct too, this time openly colluding with defense counsel to help sabotage a prosecution his own office has brought. Ennis meets his end as the last proverbial loose end to be tied up by his equally villainous but sharper partner. Didn't it occur to him that when he was busy erasing all the potential squealers, there was only going to be one bent detective standing at the end? But it was a good noir fate: blood and karma, but no true justice. I cringed a little at Mason's "lady lawyer" conversation with Della, particularly Della's on-the-nose riposte. This dialogue had to be intended as a parody of the sorts of things these characters might have said to each other had the show actually been produced in the 1930s, or maybe during the era of Burr's Perry Mason.

Noir is about corruption and mystery. Struggling with ignorance, confusion, and deceit is a core part of the noir protagonist's journey. Their world is as much an epistemological mess as it is a moral cesspool. You seem to be under the misapprehension that I am advocating a "twist" for its own sake. I am not. But predictability is a serious potential flaw in a story like the one in Perry Mason, particularly one that's eight hours long. We'll see what the season finale reveals, but so far, as indicated in my previous post and the post to which I was replying, some of us have found the tale a little less surprising than we had hoped.

There is a bit of an anticlimactic feel to the show right now, I agree. Part of it is that the villains were telegraphed a little too much: The religious organization that we expected from the start would turn out to be crooked, really is crooked. The crudely corrupt cop is revealed as crudely corrupt. And there's a Fargo fragrance to the whole affair: they're criminals, and they're evil for kidnapping a child, but they're also cloddish and inept. Nothing in Perry Mason so far has matched the twisty and twisted shock value of the moment in the film version of L.A. Confidential when {spoiler alert} Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) suddenly shoots fellow cop Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) in the middle of a seemingly professional chat about the case.

I once read a critique of this sort of activity, entitled something like, "Why Does God Hate Amputees?" The point is that all the "healings" conveniently involve health conditions that are ambiguous to begin with. Is he paralyzed, or is he pretending? Why not find a supplicant with a missing leg and leave no room for doubt after the grow-back miracle occurs?

There's no such thing as borrowing from a client. First, taking out even an actual, documented personal loan from an individual client would be unethical. But the type of "borrowing" meant here is the practice of dipping into the client's funds that are managed by the lawyer (typically an escrow account), and then replacing those funds later to make the client whole. This too is flatly unethical, but it's also a crime. There's no form of embezzlement that is excused by the law merely because the theft is paid back soon afterward, although restitution may help mitigate the offense and reduce the criminal penalty. But that doesn't matter much for an attorney who faces disbarment. Many solo practitioners or very small law firms have occasional cash flow problems, especially in tough times. These businesses are generally not heavily capitalized, so they depend on regular fee generation and collection to meet their operating expenses and to provide personal incomes for their owners, i.e., the firm's partners. E.B. was shown to enjoy both living and displaying a comfortable lifestyle, which he probably thought (a) he deserved and (b) was necessary to keep up the image of a successful attorney and generate new business. When he fell on temporary hard times, he clearly caved in to the financial pressures, some of which were self-imposed, and raided his clients' accounts.

$300 (1932 USD) = $5.6k (2020 USD).

This is typically a trait of noir and neo-noir. When the film version of The Big Sleep was being produced, the filmmakers couldn't figure out whether a particular character had committed suicide or had been murdered. They asked Raymond Chandler, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, and even he didn't know!

Episode 6 of Perry Mason proves the ironclad rule of neo-noir: It's always about real estate in the end. Especially in Los Angeles! Chinatown, The Two Jakes, L.A. Confidential, even Who Framed Roger Rabbit -- whether you're talking about water rights, development rights, or rights of way, at the bottom of the corruption is someone willing to do some killing to make a killing. (Nordic Noir has applied this principle with great glee, as seemingly every police department and/or mayoralty in Finland, Iceland, Sweden, etc., is populated by crooks in league with a sinister corporation trying to push through a new bridge, tunnel, port, casino, or complex of some kind.) Mason will get to the bottom of whatever scam is being perpetrated here, of course. But there will be casualties along the way; let's hope more of them are bad guys rather than good guys. Side comment: Emily should have informed Mason of her motel tryst, no doubt, but it makes him look awfully naive to be so thunderstruck about the revelation. Why does he think people have affairs? Just to exchange loopy love letters? Perhaps if he had interrogated her more aggressively about all her dealings with Gannon, he would have learned of this incident in advance.

That's not really the point. Acquittals are never subject to collateral attack in the American system. For example, if a jury found Emily not guilty, and the next day Mason confessed his fraud, it wouldn't make any difference to her. She's free, and can't be tried again; the fact that her lawyer was a fake would be irrelevant. But convictions are subject to collateral attack. If Mason were disbarred or sanctioned for his bar membership fraud, any client who had obtained an adverse result in a criminal proceeding would potentially have a claim for ineffective assistance of counsel, or for having been denied counsel altogether (not that this type of claim would necessarily have succeeded in the 1930s; I'm looking at this from a more general point of view). And civil matters, if Mason took on any clients who weren't criminals, would potentially fall into a gray area. Having a fake lawyer might not affect some transactions retroactively; but with others, it might. This type of discussion is beyond the scope of this thread, I think.

Not subject to attack without reliance on extrinsic evidence (e.g., testimony of a squealer) does not mean "legitimate." It just means his bar credentials are facially valid, which is a very different concept. If Mason's fraud were ever exposed, there is no chance that the legal system would treat him as having been a legitimate attorney up until the time of the deceit's coming to light. Mason knows all this, of course, meaning that he'll be accepting certain risks for himself and on behalf of his future clients by proceeding with his legal career.

It doesn't matter what she may believe privately. She understands that fundamentally, she is an entertainer who is putting on a show to make as much money as possible. She's a purported religious guide who lives in a mansion during the Depression -- that's the ultimate definition of "morally compromised."

That could easily happen, because in this Perry Mason universe, virtually everyone is morally compromised. That certainly includes Perry, Della, E.B., Emily, Sister Alice, Drake, Strickland, etc. Is anyone not compromised? Maybe Clara Drake, but we don't know her all that well. And some of these people are frauds as well. There's a difference between being morally compromised and being a fraud. Perry used to be only the former; now, he's both. A good example of the distinction among the lawyers seems to be HamBurger. He's certainly morally compromised, since he's willing to help someone cheat on the bar exam to serve his own ends (presumably). But as far as we know, his Yale Law and bar credentials are legit, so he's not a fraud.

No decent person can be permanently comfortable feeling that his professional position, his status, his income, etc., are all based on a lie -- that he's a sham, a fake. Many people suffer from "imposter syndrome" -- anxiety about being exposed as a fraud or a failure -- even when they are perfectly qualified for, and very good at, what they do. Imagine this kind of worry when you actually are a fraud. The "I did a good thing!" excuse will fade as Emily's acquittal (assuming that's what happens) recedes into the past. After securing her freedom, is Mason suddenly going to confess his deception, or at least immediately resign from the bar, so no one has to go to the trouble of throwing him out? I doubt it, or there'd be no more show. This Perry Mason is a cynical, hard-boiled character, but I don't believe he's a sociopath who can live a lie perpetually and convince himself that he fully deserves all the good things that come his way as a result.

I wonder how she determined that her first year was "successfully" completed. Did her mentor administer any kind of test? Or is this merely an "I'm done because I'm done" situation? In any case, 20 hours per week seems low to me, even for a four-year program. I hope it's at least a year-round apprenticeship, rather than one based on the school year. I'd say that a typical first-year law student in a three-year program puts in at least twice that many hours per week, counting the weekends -- often more. At my absolute busiest in law school, for a stretch of my second year when I was combining classes with multiple law review responsibilities, I was putting in 10-12 hours per day on weekdays, plus time on weekends.

He'll definitely be bothered when, e.g., his ex-wife says to his son, "Your father is an important lawyer now -- aren't you proud of him for working so hard for this accomplishment?" The fact that Mason overrode his conscience for the sake of what he deems the greater good (justice for an innocent woman) doesn't mean that he has no conscience. That's the key to understanding noir-ish characters. They accept pain for results, but the pain still hurts. As for Bernie Madoff, although he apparently was happily amoral, one of his sons, who'd worked at his firm, committed suicide a couple of years after the scam was exposed.

Hard to say. Will there be another season of this Perry Mason? It's quite possible that the only purpose of this little fraudulent scheme was to do what I mentioned above: to create a "twist" that abruptly converted Drunken Noir Detective Perry Mason into Perry Mason, Esq., in seeming defiance of the story's direction. Having placed Mason at the counsel table, the route there could be conveniently forgotten. But we've already seen E.B. pay a long-delayed price for his own past ethical lapse (dipping into a client's account for emergency funds), so it's not hard to imagine a simmering storyline in which Mason's career-launching transgression eventually comes back to haunt him. I doubt that it would involve a full disclosure -- a disbarred Perry Mason would be weak protagonist for a legal show! -- but maybe blackmail? guilt? a cover-up? Della's own misconduct exposed? We'll see. On The Shield, crimes committed by the corrupt cops in season 1 were still having major consequences in season 7.

True, that plot point was not unrealistic at all, given that the clear implication was that HamBurger gave Mason the answers as well as the questions. People who cheat on exams do so because cheating works.

Go down to the morgue and pick a new suit "off the rack."

If Mason's going to accept more clients down the road, hopefully he'll at least crack open a book on criminal procedure. And he'll certainly learn through experience and "osmosis" just from being involved in complex legal matters. This happens with all lawyers, regardless of the genesis of their bar memberships. However, I don't see how he could retroactively legitimize his own path to the bar. The system provides no way of undoing that kind of fraud. He'll just have to live with the lie -- again, essentially par for the course for a hard-boiled character. These types always have to be tormented by some past wrong that they can't undo.