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Abstract
In the film The Dark Knight, the character of Harvey Dent is an existential archetype of the American criminal prosecutor. Rather than his characterization in the Batman canon as Two-Face, a minor, but typical, comic villain, Harvey Dent's two faces are the extremes that the American public sees in prosecutors nationwide-sometimes venality and abuse; sometimes propriety and conscientiousness. In this popular culture manifestation, art reflects life reflects art. Here, the two extreme examples are Durham, North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong and Dallas, Texas District Attorney Craig Watkins. The former wrongly prosecuted the members of the Duke University Lacrosse Team; the latter established a special unit in the district attorney's office to review prior convictions for exonerations. Like Batman and Commissioner Gordon, the only face the American pubic wants to see is the good face of Harvey Dent, heroic prosecutor, not the rare skull underneath of prosecutorial misconduct.
"The duty of a public prosecutor or other government lawyer is to seek justice, not merely to convict."2
"Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.'3
"It takes a good lawyer to convict a guilty man. It takes a really good lawyer to convict an innocent man."4
"I believe in Harvey Dent."6
These quotes of fact, fiction, and aspiration reflect what Professor Richard K. Sherwin has said happens, "when law goes pop."6 Rather than Lady Justice with blindfold, sword and balance scales standing independent and apart from society, Sherwin concludes that beyond an "ordinary intermingling of law and popular culture" we are seeing "a more generalized erosion of law's legitimacy."7
From Sherwin's perspective, we are confronted with a Hobson's choice between two extreme cultural reactions to this erosion of legal legitimacy. Society fluctuates from "radical disenchantment (or skeptical postmodernism)," wherein we sink into a passive state of ironic detachment and go with the flow of events, on the one hand, or seek a "reactionary nostalgia for Enlightenment rationality and control" akin to the call for "law and order" on the other.8
Sherwin cites as a prime example the philosophical differences about law expressed in the two different film adaptations of the John D. MacDonald novel The Executioners - J. Lee Thompson's 1962 Cape Fear and Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake. Both reflect...