Discussion Film / TheStarChamber

In this movie, we see the judges all meet and Hardin, the Michael Douglas character, is participating for the first time. We see how the judges operate. The cases they all bring forward are all where completely guilty criminals have been convicted by a jury, but have gotten off after the fact on technicalities. The case of the little boy murdered by the two low-lifes brought up by Hardin is the only case where there has been no trial and no verdict.

I can't think of any other examples offhand, but I have this feeling that this is some kind of a trope, where the new guy in some way breaks the system he is being initiated into in some manner. Any ideas what trope this might be?

Moving all of this here because who needs that much information in an example?

The first is when two policemen suspicious of a man walking along go to question him and he runs, so they give chase. They see him drop a gun in his trash can and then run inside his house. The first goes to retrieve it but is told by his partner that they need a warrant-the can is his private property (You Fail Law Forever). As the dump truck comes up, they hit on an idea-wait for that trash to be dumped, then retrieve it. They do so, and we next see him in court, facing charges of robbing and killing two people for Social Security checks. The lawyer for the suspect has all their evidence suppressed as legal precedent determines that if the item was still in the scoop of the dump truck instead of the interior, it's not been mixed in and thus still separate, so they can't retrieve it (You Fail Law Forever-ridiculously, groaningly so). With no more evidence not linked to this illegal search, Judge Stephen Hardin is forced to dismiss their case and let the man go. Disillusioned, he expresses his feelings to older Judge Caulfield, who sympathizes and compares it to them changing the rules in mid-game-what used to be legal now isn't.

We then see the police finding a little boy who's been raped and murdered. Two men were later seen driving slowly late at night and attracted the suspicion of the police, who wondered if the van's occupants might be burglars. After checking the license plate for violations, the policemen pulled them over for expired paperwork, smelled marijuana (allowing them to search the van), and saw a bloody shoe inside. However, the paperwork was actually submitted on time (it was merely processed late), meaning the police had no reason to pull over the van and Hardin has no choice but to throw out any subsequently discovered evidence, i.e. the bloody shoe (this became legal in 1984, a year after the film was released, with the good-faith exception.) Hardin is even more distraught when the father of the boy then tries to shoot the two criminals in court but misses and shoots a cop instead. Subsequently, the father commits suicide while in jail. After seeing all of this, Judge Hardin approaches his friend, Judge Caulfield (Hal Holbrook), who tells him of a modern-day "Star Chamber": a group of judges who identify criminals who fell through the judicial system's cracks and then 'do something about them.'