Television’s First Public Prosecutor

My colleague David Papke recently posted on “Law and Order and the Rise of the Pop Culture Prosecutor.”  David noted that unlike most lawyer television shows of the past, the long-running series focused on prosecutors rather than defense lawyers. While it is certainly true that most television and motion picture lawyers have been defense attorneys rather than prosecutors, the first-ever television lawyer show was actually about a prosecutor.

In 1947, Jerry Fairbanks Productions filmed a pilot episode of a show called Public Prosecutor, and when the show was picked up by NBC for broadcast in 1948, the company filmed an additional twenty-six episodes for the network.

Public Prosecutor starred John Howard (pictured above) as a prosecutor named Stephen Allen who both solved crimes and prosecuted miscreants.

In what would become the tradition of “good guy” prosecutors, Stephen Allen was much more interested in making sure that the actual guilty party was charged with the crime than he was in winning easy courtroom victories. (Star and narrator John Howard, whose real name was John R. Cox, is best known as the actor who played Kathryn Hepburn’s fiance in The Philadelphia Story and Fred McMurray’s boss on the long running television show, My Three Sons.)

Public Prosecutor is probably best remembered in the history of television for being the first television show to be filmed first and shown later. Earlier shows had been broadcast live.

Unfortunately, episodes of Public Prosecutor were filmed in twenty-minute installments — a common format for radio shows of that era — but in the fall of 1948, NBC decided to shelve the show in favor of another series whose episodes ran for thirty minutes, which had emerged as the new television standard.

Public Prosecutor sat in the can, unshown, until 1951, when its rights were purchased by the Dumont Network (one of the major players in early network television). To extend the episodes to thirty minutes, Dumont stopped the film just before the guilty party was revealed and brought in a panel to discuss what they had seen. The panel, along with the television audience, then tried to figure out “Whodunit?” Once the panelists had made their guesses, the film was restarted and the remainder of the episode was shown.

Public Prosecutor ended after the 1951-52 season, as no efforts were made to film additional episodes. However, surviving episodes from 1947-48 suggest that the show was quite good, particularly given the early date of its production. Two episodes, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” and “The Case of the Comic Strip Murder,” can be viewed online at http://ctva.biz/US/Crime/PublicProsecutor.htm.  The former episode can also be see at http://www.archive.org/details/PublicProsecutor-CaseOfTheManWhoWasntThere.

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Kopp Offers Hope in Commencement Speech for Better Education Results in Milwaukee

In May 2009, Kalyn Gigot was sitting in the audience at Marquette University’s commencement ceremony as a no-doubt proud graduate. But it was a year later, at Marquette’s commencement Sunday, when Gigot was individually singled out for attention and praise in the graduation address.

What did she do in between? She joined Teach for America, the nationwide organization that puts thousands of high-caliber college graduates into high-needs classrooms for the first two years after graduation. Gigot has been teaching this year at Northwest Secondary School, a Milwaukee Public Schools middle and high school program near North 72nd Street and West Silver Spring Drive.

Wendy Kopp, the founder and CEO of Teach for America, received an honorary degree at the commencement and, in her strongly localized speech, described how much Gigot had accomplished in her year teaching math to sixth and seventh graders.  Students who were generally three years behind in their math skills have made substantial progress, the learning atmosphere in Gigot’s classroom has improved sharply as the year has gone on, and Gigot has gone to lengths to get to know her students and their families, including home visits of seventy-two of them, Kopp said. 

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Playing with Fire and an Obama Effigy

People do imbecilic things when alcohol enters the mix.  It is a fact of life.  On one end of the spectrum, drunkenness promotes relatively harmless buffoonery, whether it is singing along to “Sweet Caroline” completely out of tune at the bars on Water Street or repeatedly professing one’s love for his or her friends and family.  Sometimes, the passions of the moment, coupled with inhibitions lowered, push one to act out ill-conceived ideas that the voice of reason would have prevented, such as drunk-dialing.  On the other end of the spectrum, a beer- and liquor-swilling patron’s conduct may cross the line into the unlawful.

As the story develops, the burning of a statue of President Obama in West Allis may be in the company of the latter behavior.   TMJ4 reported that at the Yester Year’s bar, patrons lit a bust of Obama on fire.  The video footage was blurry given the room’s darkness and only focused on the statue placed on the bar, though “hoots and hollers” can be heard in the background.  Though West Allis is investigating whether the burning violated the city’s municipal fire code, the Milwaukee District Attorney’s Office will not charge anyone involved in this incident, and the Secret Service has terminated its own investigation.

This incident may very well not prompt legal action beyond those for possible fire code violations.  One cannot help but wonder, however, if the First Amendment would provide protection for burning an Obama effigy. 

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