'Reversal Of Fortune'

I'm happy I watched this film if for nothing other than understanding Jerry Seinfeld's joke on his sitcom when referencing his neighbor's coma as being (or not) a coma like Sunny von Bülow. I don't know why I just didn't look it up.

Anyway, the main theme of this film is justice and it provokes a certain amount of mental anguish attempting to deconstruct our current judicial system and the case of Claus von Bülow.

Claus was blamed for Sunny's vegetative state, which lasted 28 years until her death in 2008 (which completely passed me by), after was injected with insulin.

The film was adapted from Alan Dershowitz's book of the same name. Clearly, this was going to be a biased account in film.

Nonetheless, Claus is painted clearly as the murderer: He'd been unresponsive and lackadaisical during an earlier incident, they'd been on the verge of divorce and Sunny had all the money. Meanwhile, he was sleeping with another woman.

After Dershowitz took the case, it all changed. Facts were blurred or testimony questioned. Dershowitz and Claus won the appeal and the latter was set free. He'd later get a divorce and his daughter with Sunny actually took his side and she was written out of the will by Sunny's rich family.

What never changes is Claus' probable guilt. In the United States, you are innocent until proven guilty and you must be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt by a jury of your peers.

This is all fine and good until you come upon a case like Claus. By all intentions, Claus was guilty. I think his lawyers believed that and there's little to doubt that this is the case.

Claus didn't win in the longterm. He wound up divorce from Sunny and didn't get any of the money. He did escape prison, which means something.

What do you do with someone that is probably guilty, but do to any number of circumstances can not be convincted? By the great laws of this land, that person is innocent. Nothing you can do.

However, it's maddening seeing Claus simply get away with something. It's never right if someone is wrongly accused or even wrongly convicted of crime. To me, it's equally as wrong if someone is not convicted of a crime. We will never know if Claus drugged his wife. Maybe it was her recreational drug use that did her in. Maybe it was his syringe.

It is good enough to stand up for the rights of the accused (like Dershowitz) if, indeed, that individual is guilty? Here we must understand that attorneys are not merely defended a person or a company. They are defending the principals spelled out in our torts and Constitution. It's bigger than Claus or O.J. Simpson or Lizzie Borden or Charlie Manson.

It's about the truly innocent person accused next that needs cases like Simpson and Claus to work out the way they did, no matter how unfair it may seem.

In this film, Dershowitz is often cited as defending two black guys on death row for a murder they didn't commit. There is no resolution to this case in the film, but it's brought up all the time because its that case that is helped or hurt by whether or not Dershowitz and his team can get Claus off the hook.