– a courtroom drama that is one of the 10 films nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards on Monday .
There is also the conversational style of proceedings, in which the accused and other parties stand up and intervene – often without the assent of the court – to challenge statements by lawyers and witnesses and argue with them.“I’m sorry to interrupt, I’m sorry. But ... I don’t know, you, you come here, OK, with your, maybe your opinion, and you tell me who Samuel was, and what we were going through,” Sandra Voyter says.
“At times she was more of an advocate than an impartial adjudicator – which is the line we draw,” Collins says. “In our system we exclude things that in ordinary life we might assume to be relatively reliable gauges of what has happened; like hearsay, like informed speculation, things we use every day to help make a sanity check of what we believe and do not believe.