Professor Suja Thomas wears a Statue of Liberty costume in her documentary about the disappearing jury trial. Thomas' film will be featured at the DOC NYC festival in November. (Courtesy of Suja Thomas)
A man accused of a crime faces a choice between pleading guilty and receiving probation or risking 11 years in prison by insisting on a jury trial. Another spends 13 years behind bars before being exonerated. And workers who allege discrimination and harassment find their claims dismissed by judges or diverted into private arbitration.
Their stories are at the heart of "The Best Justice System in the World," a new documentary in which law professor Suja A. Thomas examines how plea bargaining, summary judgment and arbitration have displaced jury trials in the American justice system.
Thomas takes an unconventional approach to the subject: Drawing inspiration from "Bowling for Columbine" filmmaker Michael Moore, she uses humor to expose what she sees as the absurdities of the justice system.
The trailer to Thomas' documentary, "The Best Justice System in the World."
A professor at University of Illinois College of Law and author of "The Missing American Jury," Thomas dons a Statue of Liberty costume, quizzes ordinary Americans about the justice system and confronts officials with questions that sometimes elicit answers as comical as they are troubling.
The 88-minute film, Thomas' directorial debut, will have its world premiere at the DOC NYC film festival in New York on Nov. 15. It features people whose lives have been upended by the legal system, alongside interviews with legal experts and judges, including U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff and former federal judge Shira Scheindlin.
Thomas spoke with Law360 about the experiences that inspired the film, the challenge of using humor to explore injustice and why she believes restoring the jury's role is essential to reforming the legal system.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your experiences as a young lawyer inspire you to make this documentary?
It starts with a case in New York City. I was a young lawyer, and I had the opportunity to get on a jury trial immediately when I started at a law firm [currently] called
Vladeck Raskin & Clark PC. We won a retaliation claim and the jury found in favor of our client and, on back pay and emotional distress damages, ordered $219,428. The judge reduced the verdict to $20,000 in the case. I actually had never heard of remittitur, and I thought, "Why can a judge actually change what a jury does?" I was really surprised by this, and it made me mad.
And then not long after, I was in another case where we represented a Columbia University professor, and we had fantastic evidence of discrimination. There was a motion for summary judgment. The judge granted that motion and decided that a "reasonable" jury couldn't find for the plaintiff. I just thought: this doesn't make any sense. Why can judges do this?
I started to worry about the system. How can people's right to a jury trial essentially be taken away?
Eventually, I became an academic and I looked into those subjects and realized that these procedures were all made up. Historically, they didn't exist. And I started looking at plea bargaining on the criminal side. I saw the "trial tax" that's put on people to plead guilty or get much more time in prison if they're convicted by a jury also had no basis in history.
I wrote books and articles, and I finally realized this wasn't doing enough to get the word out there. Another thing that was happening in the background was that people were writing to me, asking me about summary judgment, saying, how can this be? People would leave messages for me, you know, so distraught. So I thought, let me try to make a documentary that people will watch, that can expose the issue to a large audience to try to get people to start talking about this, so that change can be made. That's how I got here.
The film follows people pressured to plead guilty alongside workers whose claims never reached a jury. What connects their stories?
The thread that holds all of the stories together is the right to a jury trial. In the criminal cases, we see people pleading guilty, including to crimes they didn't commit in some circumstances, because of this pressure to plead guilty.
On the civil side of things, summary judgments take away the right to a jury trial, and arbitration does a similar thing. These three procedures that are featured in the film take away the right to a jury trial.
This all sounds really serious, but humor is a huge part of this film.
Why did you decide to tackle such a serious subject with humor?
Michael Moore's films were an inspiration for me because he reached huge amounts of people. People would go to the theater because Michael Moore made a film that was extremely entertaining. So when I thought about making this film, I didn't want to make a film that people wouldn't watch, or that a very small number of people would watch because it was so serious.
Michael Moore has done a really good job bringing issues to the public in the past using humor. I thought I would borrow from his playbook and use man-on-the-street interviews. It was great because there were a lot of questions I wanted to ask people about what they thought about the justice system, what they knew about the justice system.
Another aspect on which I was inspired by other filmmakers is questioning. The film "Inside Job" by Charles Ferguson was just so incredible at asking people questions. You are asking people questions about the system, but the system is so obviously wrong that it almost is somewhat humorous. So I thought that even just asking about the justice system itself would elicit interesting answers.
There's also the element of being in costume. I call it "Borat light." Early in the making of the film, before I shot anything, I decided I was gonna dress as a Statue of Liberty. I tried some other outfits too. I dressed as one of the Founders. But the Statue of Liberty was something that I tested with an audience, and people liked the statue, and so we were like, "OK, we'll keep the statue."
What did you learn from following Michael Johnson, a man facing criminal charges who was offered probation in exchange for pleading guilty?
The biggest thing that I learned was the very troubling role of police reports in our criminal justice system. I realized that police reports are this incredibly powerful tool that people don't understand are being used in a way that I think they shouldn't be used. They are used, essentially, to get plea deals. Anybody who's going to be taking a police report may or may not have the actual facts. They're just interviewing people and then they're making a conclusion. Prosecutors use that when they decide what to charge. Plea bargaining is occurring based on these police reports, and these aren't carefully thought out documents.
Sometimes, the police might not be doing the right thing. Then the prosecutor is making a decision, and because stuff is happening so quickly, in a lot of cases, there's no significant investigation.
Some of the film's funniest moments come from your encounters with officials. Were you expecting those exchanges?
You're just asking questions about the system, but the answers to those questions are going to be outrageous. I was just asking normal questions because the system is so messed up.
I'm asking arbitrators about how much they get paid. It's funny, you know? I'm asking a police chief about a coercive interrogation done by officers in his department, and I literally don't know if he's ever seen it. And the answer I get is kind of funny, but very bad, given that he's responsible for training people.
I never thought there would be this many moments in the film. I got lucky.
Juries aren't immune to bias. Why do you trust them more than judges?
The biases that people have — that's a reality in our world because we're just human beings. With that said, the question is: what's the best system? Our Founders set up a Constitution that has people tried by a jury because they thought that 12 people should have to convict someone if we're going to take someone's liberty away. They didn't want one judge to decide. They didn't want one prosecutor to decide. They weren't thinking about arbitrations, but they wouldn't want one arbitrator to decide a case.
Each of those individuals had their own bias, and they were concerned about judges being a part of the government. They were concerned about judges being subject to corruption, and these are all real things. And each of us as individuals — not just arbitrators, prosecutors, judges — has possible bias. But what's better: having a group of people who check one another and have to talk to each other, or one person? The Founders picked the jury. And I agree with that system.
Critics argue that more jury trials would overwhelm the courts. How do you respond?
My answer is that our system wouldn't be overwhelmed if more cases went to jury trials. But right now, we're cutting off that right completely. If we had, for example, a limit on the trial penalty, more people would go to a jury trial, but not everybody, because again, they don't want to risk that penalty.
As to civil cases, you know, it is a very popular refrain: "the system can't handle it." There are a lot of statements that are made that aren't proven, and that's one of them. Plaintiffs have a lot to lose by going to trial. They can lose. You don't guarantee that 12 people are going to agree with you. So people are not going to take the jury trial 100% of the time, or even 80% of the time, or probably even 50% of the time.
How did you go from being a law professor to making your first documentary?
I started working on it in 2016. I wasn't trained as a filmmaker, but I thought I could make a documentary. I had written two books, and I was running around the country talking about the books and while I was in those places I would interview people, judges, lawyers. I would interview some possible characters, so I did some investigation about possible stories. So I got some sense that, yeah, I think I can do this.
Years later, I got into a fellowship with a film company and started to learn about filmmaking. I spent five months raising money, just being on a bunch of Zoom calls trying to convince people that it was a good project. And after I was able to do that, I knew in the fall of 2021 that I had some time off and that I was going to actually start filming.
What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
The number one thing is I want to have the issue exposed. By making a film, I think that as many people as possible can hear about this issue, and then they can take action if they would like to take action. I wanted to make people aware of this.
What we need is something similar to what happened with the documentaries about the food system. Someone made a food documentary, and then another person made a food documentary, and now we have a totally different system than we did before the food documentaries. If the food documentaries hadn't happened, I don't think we'd have all the labeling that we have. I don't think we'd have some of the legislation that we have.
And so, what I'm trying to do with this film is to make people think this isn't right. That's what I want as a result of this film.
Have a story idea for Access to Justice? Reach us at accesstojustice@law360.com.