Detective Will Jeffries: Thirty years is a long time to remember a call you made, Ms. Gloria.
Gloria Munez: I remember real good, sir. You want to know why? Because those damn police actually came for once.
Detective Lilly Rush: What does that mean?
Gloria Munez: Black folks from the project calling on Friday night, police don't come. But that night that black cop showed up. And he gets to fightin' with the drug dealer.
The police are questioning a witness. The detective asks for a specific detail, such as the date of a past event or the name of a suspect. This is not something a witness would be likely to remember with precision.
Gloria Munez: I remember real good, sir. You want to know why? Because those damn police actually came for once.
Detective Lilly Rush: What does that mean?
Gloria Munez: Black folks from the project calling on Friday night, police don't come. But that night that black cop showed up. And he gets to fightin' with the drug dealer.
— Cold Case, "The Runner"
However, the witness does remember, exactly and with certainty. Before we can raise an eyebrow, he explains why he remembers. It turns out he has some connection to the name, date, or other information. The suspect had the same name as the witness's father, or the date was his daughter's birthday.
This is essentially a Hand Wave. It saves everyone the trouble of long, boring scenes where witnesses consult their calendars, go through receipts, or any of the other activities one might do in real life to reconstruct such details. On occasion, though, the witness's offhand statement turns out to be a clue, or sets off a "Eureka!" Moment.
Standard in the Police Procedural.
Examples:
Film
- Back to the Future Part II: In a Deleted Scene, the historical preservation society member says that he remembers the day lightning struck the clock tower because it was also the same day that Biff Tannen stiffed him out of a repair bill for cleaning a truckload of manure out of Biff's car.
- A variant in Bad Boys (1995): "Did you hear what I said? I heard what I said, 'cause I was standing there when I said it."
- Parodied, like so much else, in Clue. As he recounts the night's events, Wadsworth suddenly pauses and answers the question that absolutely nobody was asking.
Wadsworth: I was in the hall. I know because I was there.
- In My Cousin Vinny, one of the witnesses testifies that the two yootsnote took five minutes in the store because he was cooking his breakfast when they went in and eating when the gun shots were heard. Vinny discredits this because he learned earlier it takes twenty minutes to cook grits properly.
- In Slumdog Millionaire, the main character is able to answer the gameshow's trivia questions because most of the answers directly relate to memorable events in his life.
- Without a Clue: Kincaid asks a dockworker why he specifically remembers Giles renting a boat and is told that Giles (or rather the man impersonating him) had a suitcase chained to his wrist and kept complaining about the weight. This turns out to have been done to make a deliberate impression for a Death Faked for You gambit.
Literature
- 87th Precinct: In Ghosts, a bartender remembers a suspect was drinking at the bar during the murder because, right around that time, another customer did a drunken striptease and the suspect gave the bartender a $5 tip and made a joke about the floor show.
- In the novel Anastasia Absolutely, there is an investigation into a bomb found in a mailbox. It's mentioned that one of the letters underneath the bomb was a birthday card, and the police could pinpoint the time it was mailed because the woman who mailed it remembered the song that had come on the radio a moment before.
- The Boys from Brazil: The adoption agent who placed the baby Hitler clones with unsuspecting families has difficulty remembering their names years later, but does vividly remember one family who gave her a puppy out of gratitude for helping them get a child.
- Break In: When Kit decides to use the past misdeeds of a Corrupt Corporate Executive to enact some Laser-Guided Karma, he recalls how he earlier heard a brief list of companies the man took advantage of. He only remembers the name of one of those companies (Purfleet Electronics), and only because he once spent a vacation in the town of Purfleet.
- John Putnam Thatcher:
- In Come to Dust, a witness to a hit-and-run remembers three digits of the license plate because they match his own.
- In Going for the Gold, Thatcher questions how an extremely busy salesgirl can remember a transaction involving a fake check five days after it happened.
Captain Milliken: She says she doesn't often sell an American Indian headdress to a German. - In Chrystine Brouillet's French novel, Les Neuf Vies D Edouard, a witness remembers the exact time he saw a suspect because he was very worried of running late for his plane at the time. This is particularly unnecessary detail repeated as third-hand information to the reader.
- An interview with a man who claims to have seen red and green UFOS chasing his car, from Otis G. Firefly's Phantasmagoric Almanac and Calendar: "I remember it real good 'cos it the Fourth of July!"
- Older Than Television: In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Retired Colourman" (1926), Watson remembers the number of a theatre ticket because it was his old school number.
- In Star Wars: Allegiance a young captured pirate says this phrase, but the stormtroopers who captured him don't care why he remembers which day it had been, so they cut him off.
- Inverted in Isaac Asimov's short story "Whats In A Name" when the suspect who works at the science reference library claims they don't remember the name of a furrier named Ernest Beilstein who inquired at the reference desk at the alibi moment. The detective alleges that she could not possibly have forgotten this due to the coincidence of his sharing a name with Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry, the canonical sixty-volume encyclopedia of chemical compounds and reactions.
Live Action Television
- Cold Case: For a show that depends almost entirely on witness statements dating back as early as 1919, they really don't rely on this as much as you'd think. Someone who claims not to remember something unremarkable that happened 20 years ago is almost certainly lying. That said, they do put forth the effort every so often.
- In an early episode, Lilly fully expects a witness not to remember anything specific about the date a girl her boyfriend might have known was killed, but she remembers exactly where she was because she was losing her virginity to said boyfriend at the time. Subverted. She and the boyfriend killed the girl together.
- Season 6 has episodes where the victim was killed during the first moon landing ("One Small Step") and the day JFK was assassinated ("November 22").
- Criminal Minds:
- In "Paradise", the proprietor of a popular diner where two victims stopped at says that with the number of customers she has, they would have had to be "doing cartwheels on fire" to make an impression. However, she does in fact remember them because Mr. Sanders gave her a $10.00 tip two visits in a row.
- A witness to a plane crash remembers the exact time he saw a streak of light (presumably a missile of some sort) go into the sky because his favorite show had just started and the intro was playing.
- In an episode of CSI, a man can recall the exact time he heard something suspicious due to having rented a porno pay-per-view movie scheduled to start at that time.
- In the Ellery Queen pilot movie, a bartender cites several reasons he remembers when a particular customer had an alibi visiting his bar on a particular night (he was late to work that day because it was his granddaughter's birthday, the suspect made a large donation to a charity box while collecting his change, and they left together while the bartender was stepping out to get a newspaper right after it was delivered).
- Can be played for comedy, too. On Friends, Monica tells Joey that Chandler met a woman named Ginger. "I remember because when he told me, I said "the movie star."
- In another episode, Monica remembers precisely what time she ran into Richard despite claiming she's not still in love with him, because she'd been arguing with a clerk over whether or not a movie was late at the time.
- Hill Street Blues: A court witness with transactional immunity (meaning he couldn't be prosecuted for any crimes related to his testimony) when asked why he was so sure about a date said "because that was the same day I killed a cop."
- Used regularly in the Law & Order franchise. For example, In Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, "Brotherhood", guest characters Nathan and Alicia's alibi, a movie date, checks out because a theater employee remembers Alicia's pink hair.
- In The Love Boat episode "Aunt Hilly," Vicki's titular rich aunt can't remember her son's birthday more specifically than "April or May," which she only remembers because his birth interrupted a social function.
- In the "Reese Joins the Army" two-parter, Hal is made The Scapegoat for his company's white-collar crimes, and at first, he is unable to make head or tail of the specific dates he's accused of committing various misdeeds and thus can't contradict them. However, once he learns that every date on that list is on a Friday, he can remember an alibi: he's been skipping work every Friday for over a decade (something he can amply document).
- An episode of Monk has a competitive eating champion who tells Stottlemeyer and Disher that an all you can eat buffet he was at at the time of the crime can back him up because: "Oh, they'll remember me."
- Murdoch Mysteries: In "What Lies Buried", despite being a Scatter Brained Senior, former Chief Inspector Stockton remembers his last meeting with Constable Finch (who vanished mysteriously before his dead body is found about 20 years later) because he was in a hurry to get to his anniversary party and told Finch that whatever he had to say would have to wait until after Stockton got back.
- No Ordinary Family: George remembers the murder of the gun-wielding vigilante's son from "No Ordinary Vigilante" because it happened during his first week on the job.
- Perry Mason In "The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink," a desk clerk at an unimpressive hotel remembers the exact day he left Los Angeles on a business trip because "If you worked at the Keymont Hotel, you wouldn’t have trouble remembering when you got a free trip to Mexico City."
- In an (in)famous episode of The Practice a witness on the stand Remembered Because she was about to go inside to watch Boston Public at the time - both produced by David E. Kelley. Infamous because earlier that same season there was a Crossover between the two shows, despite them being on different Networks.
- Seinfeld: In "The Library," Jerry claims that he did return a decades-overdue library book, saying the event is burned into his memory because he was on a great date at the time. It turns out that he actually returned a different book with a similar title.
- Suits: Five years after Daniel Hardman met with his mistress at a hotel, the staff still remember him due to how cheaply he tipped them.
- The reason of having heard something suspicious while a scheduled porn movie is starting is used in an episode of Veronica Mars.
Newspaper Comics
- Parodied in a Far Side cartoon — a woman points out a man in a police line-up, saying "That's him! That's the one! I'd remember that dinky little hat anywhere!" The man in question is twice the size of everyone else, with three eyes and a trunk.
