8.2 /10 1 Votes
8.8/10 TV Original language(s) English No. of episodes 13 | 7.6/10 IMDb Country of origin United States No. of seasons 1 Final episode date 31 March 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Created by Michelle KingRobert King Starring Jason O'MaraKyle MacLachlanMarisol NicholsConstance ZimmerDaniel Cosgrove Network American Broadcasting Company Cast | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In Justice is an American television police procedural created by Michelle King and Robert King. The series began airing on Sunday, January 1, 2006 on ABC as a midseason replacement and assumed its regular night and time on Friday, January 6, 2006 at 9 p.m. EST. It was cancelled after its 13-episode run on March 31, 2006. The series was simulcast in Canada on CTV. In the UK In Justice was shown on UKTV Gold beginning September 17, 2006 and was later repeated on ABC1 in 2007.
Contents
Premise
In Justice focuses on freeing wrongly convicted criminals. Kyle MacLachlan (of Twin Peaks) stars as David Swain, a wealthy and successful lawyer who heads a high-profile organization called the National Justice Project (commonly abbreviated as "NJP") in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with his lead investigator, ex-police detective Charles Conti (portrayed by Jason O'Mara). Members of the National Justice Project work pro-bono to overturn wrongful convictions, liberate the falsely accused and discover the identity of those who are really to blame. Although the NJP is fictional, there are organizations which examine cases involving people who may have been wrongly convicted (e.g. the Innocence Project).
Each new episode starts out with "what the jury believed", usually a scene in which the person who was wrongly convicted acts out the crime. Throughout the show, David and Charles unravel many clues to how and why the person they are trying to exonerate was convicted in the first place.
Each episode revolves around separate cases and addresses the various reasons for miscarriage of justice. The progress in the show relies less on the famous but largely fictitious forensic procedures used in the CSI franchise and other procedural shows. In a few episodes "CSI-fiction" is mentioned as a description of theatre and inaccuracy, and sometimes forgery of forensics technology.
The series deals with a few subplots. The most prominent is Conti's remorse from his time as a police officer, when he caused an innocent suspect's suicide by coercing him to confess to the murder of his family, and how it makes him obsessed with clearing the wrongfully convicted. Other subplots deals with Swain's uneasy relationship with judicial colleagues and the district attorney's attempts to discredit him, Sonya's personal motivations for clearing the wrongfully convicted - her brother being one of them, and Brianna's reservations and doubts about some of the cases.
Episodes
The show's "sneak-peek" episode aired on January 1, 2006, while the original series pilot was aired on January 6, 2006. According to Variety, the program won its timeslot in the January 1 sneak airing and finished second in its January 6 timeslot, the latter just slightly behind CBS's Close to Home. The eighth episode, "The Public Burning", came in second to NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics.
The team succeeds in clearing a convicted person in each episode, except in "The Public Burning", where justice fails and a mild mentally challenged man is executed just minutes before truth is revealed (though it is unclear if the team were able to expose the killer, since Conti confronts the murderer in his house)