Murder On A Sunday Morning (2001): The True Story of Falsely-accused Brendon Butler

Oscar-winning documentary that documents a murder trial in which a 15-year-old African-American is wrongfully accused of a 2000 murder in Jacksonville, Florida.



When one of the cops told public defender Pat McGuinness "to keep sucking on that cancer stick," McGuinness said, "I always have a cigarette before sex... I was letting him know I was going to screw him."

Reviews from IMDb:

Blind Justice
Author: tieman64 from United Kingdom
26 June 2010

"I began to feel that the drama of the truth is far richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films." - Ken Burns

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's "Murder on a Sunday Morning" is a powerful documentary which focuses on the wrongful arrest of Brendon Butler, a fifteen year old African American kid from Jacksonville, Florida.

The documentary watches as various authority figures rush to pass judgement on young Brendon, falsifying evidence, manipulating the kid and wrongly charging him with the murder of Mary Ann Stephens, a 65-year-old tourist from Georgia.

Much of the documentary focuses on public defender Pat McGuinness, a figure seemingly straight out of a John Grisham novel. A chain-smoking, whisky drinking, hard-working, lone-wolf attorney, McGuinness seizes upon this miscarriage of justice like a rabid hyena, dazzling us with his quiet determination and subtle tactics (watch how he ingratiates himself with the police force, only to sucker information out of them).

Because Lestrade's camera crew is given access to seemingly every nook and cranny of this case, the film branches off into several interesting directions. For example, the film examines the way the police, anxious not to damage the local tourist trade, frantically rushed to close the case. Under pressure to find the murderer as soon as possible, the cops then plucked Brendon (who at the time of his arrest was en route to a job interview) randomly off the streets, simply because he was a young black man.

The film touches upon racial profiling and stereotyping, but complicates things when it is revealed that the detective who intimidated and physically beat up Brendon was himself an African American. The film then gradually reveals how the police used strong-arm tactics to coerce witnesses and unlawfully squeeze a guilty verdict out of the distraught kid.

What's really great about the film, though, is the Butler family. A tightly knit group of black Christians, they quietly rally behind their son, who himself comes across as a rather soft spoken, bespectacled, kind-hearted kid. The film presents a very endearing view of this family unit, contrasting their religious faith with the cold, logic-driven style of Pat McGuinness. Many of the film's greatest moments simply involve the family praying together or sitting anxiously in the courtroom while their little boy is tried for murder. When the camera lingers on them, always in a state of extreme anxiety, it's hard not to empathise with their plight.

Mostly, though, documentaries like this are powerful in the way they capture a "realism" impossible in fictional cinema. Every line of dialogue here, every gesture, every emotion, is infinitely more powerful precisely because it is genuine. You cannot ever "simulate" or "act" in such a way as to reproduce this (which is why the opposite approach is often utilised by cinema's most profound directors, who favour an abstract, metaphysical tone). When a craggy looking female lawyer stands before a courtroom and interrogates a nervous looking police officer, it is emotionally charged and sociologically interesting in a way that you simple can not find in any other art-form or medium. Every mannerism, every tick, gesture, habit or bit of clothing, takes on a whole new level of interest. These aren't design or stylistic choices we're asked to witness, but the actions and decisions – both grand and small – of real human beings.

Many buzz words can be used to describe "Murder on a Sunday Morning" – a tale of faith, power abuse, the importance of integrity, the dangers of large systems and the benefits of their various checks and balances – but mostly the film works because it's scary, the warmth of the Butler family juxtaposed to the cold sterility of wood panelled public courtrooms. Like a hospital waiting room, the film takes us to that space of terror where the domestic and the public intersect. That place where one's fate is placed entirely in another's hands, the family unit taken out of its comfort zone and placed at the mercy of a monstrous bureaucracy whose various rituals are seen to be cold, dispassionate and wholly terrifying. The monster of this film is thus bureaucracy itself, whose invisible hands influence all, through targets, deadlines and a hunger for met statistics.

9/10 - See "The Staircase", "Century of Self", "Paradise Lost 1 and 2", "The Thin Blue Line", "Capturing The Friedmans" and anything by Frederick Wiseman. Aside from "The Wire", cinema hasn't really been able to capture the tempo of the criminal justice system as well as the best works in documentary cinema. Worth two viewings.

You MUST watch this true documentary if . . .
9/10
Author: charlytully from Rosebush
5 July 2009

You think the police are always right.

You believe that "eye-witnesses" are always right.

You believe the prosecutors will not take a case to court if lazy police have failed to perform 98% of a basic investigation.

You believe a U.S. city might have a "few bad apples" in law enforcement, but that the "good cops" will quickly nip those who systematically engage in evil-for-evil's sake in the bud.

You believe that the possibility of an ex-football lineman being instated as a detective solely because his dad is the county sheriff, and being allowed to beat "confessions" out of randomly-selected teenagers with absolutely no fear of negative consequences to himself could happen in the America of the 1930s, but not today.

You believe a judge will NOT send a case to the jury if anyone with a brain in their head can see the defendant is a totally random passer-by nabbed by the police because it was hot, and they did not feel like working that day.

You believe that all the innocent people imprisoned six months here or 20 years there are "exceptions to the rule," and an injustice like this could NEVER involve your family member, someone in the middle class, or someone like YOU.

You think that you are aware of every terrible, indisputable, 100% proved outrage of the last 10 years in America--yet you haven't seen this film.

Brilliant and Disturbing
Author: Tiger_Mark from The Greater Southwest
9 July 2003

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

There are very few films that I think everybody should be required to see and this is one of them. If this film does not open your eyes to the reality of criminal law, well, nothing will. The story involves the robbery and murder of an older woman in Jacksonville. The woman is shot dead for refusing to give up her purse, her husband witnesses the act. The one thing that the husband is sure of, is that the murderer was a black man. *SPOILERS* Sadly, the Jacksonville's PD's solution is to go out to the crime scene a few hours later and arrest the first black person they see. Who they arrest is a 15 year old boy, on his way to Blockbuster Video. What is next, is pure insanity. The police charge the young man, who is from a nice family, with no criminal background, with murder. Not only will the police get an alleged confession from the accused, but they will also get a positive ID from the husband of the murder victim. The only problem, the kid did not do it. Yes, it is true, witnesses are wrong and people often confess to what they did not do. What few people realize, is how often police and district attorneys are the real criminals. Too often, the evidence does not lead to the suspect, the evidence is instead built around the suspect. More often than not, that suspect is black. I have this film and I show it to my classes every year and every year young people start to realize that justice is not black and white. And sometimes, those people we think are the good guys, well...

This film changed the way I think
10/10
Author: Tony Lewis from Matcham - Australia
3 January 2006