What to know about my documentary

I had decided to watch the documentary called The Thin Blue Line for my documentary project. I have since finished watching it.

To introduce some of my initial thoughts on the documentary, I found it to be very similar to the short television series Making a Murderer that we just watched. The film follows the story of Randall Adams, Dennis Harris, and the law enforcement involved on a journey that involves questionable police work and culminates in an unbelievable ending for all parties involved.

Image Source

To dive into it further, the film surprised me with the lack of police competence that was shown in regard to achieving justice. In a previous blog, for Steven Avery, I discussed how achieving a conviction seemed to be more important then getting justice for the individual and I was hoping this was the only major evidence for this happening in our world. I was wrong. In The Thin Blue Line, it seems that Randall Adams is caught in a situation with police where he is being held accountable for the death of a local police officer. The police threaten him for a statement saying that he did it, coach a known trouble maker, Dennis Harris, to take the stand against Randall, and even use witnesses testimony that has no backing and is from unreliable sources. The entire investigation against Randall Adams, which got him the death penalty reduced to life in prison, seems to be built on questionable police work. What was more surprising was that Dennis Harris stated that he had stole the gun and car involved in the crime, bragged about it to his friends, and has a criminal record. He is bad news and the police were swayed by him due to the fact that he was only sixteen years old at the time this occurred. The irony in this is Harris ended up killing someone else and is on death row for that separate case. Th entire film was filled with surprises and ended in quite the most ironic and saddest of ways. I cannot wait to elaborate more on it for you guys!

Questions I still have about this film after viewing it revolves around the police department and their practices. Why did they act the way they did? Did they know that Adams seemed to be truly innocent? Did they care about justice? Or did they just want to get a conviction? All of these questions are ones I think are worth looking at in order to understand this most unusual turn of events.