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Murder On A Sunday Morning Analysis

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Murder on a Sunday Morning, is an Oscar award-winning documentary that tells of the conviction and trial of 15-year-old Brenton Butler for the death of Mary Ann Stephens in Jacksonville, Florida of May 2000. The film is a 111-minute movie directed by Jean-Xavier de Lastrade. The plot originates from the incident of Mary Ann Stephens being shot in the head by a black assailant; and then begins to unravel as Brenton Butler is arrested 90 minutes after the murder has occurred. Pat McGuinness, one of the main interviewees in the movie, takes up the case and defends Brenton Butler. The documentary presents the film from the trial, as well as interviews and investigations that Pat McGuinness and his partner Ann Finnel performed to gather facts for …show more content…

As you are shown in the film, after the identification of Brenton Butler and his so-called testimony to investigators, the police and prosecutors just stopped working on the case. Thus, evidence that would have supported Butler’s innocence and help find the actual killer weren’t discovered until Brenton’s defense attorney, Pat McGuinness did some investigation and research of his own. Thus, flowing from film from the trial to McGuinness’s investigation scenes shows the how he attained the information that he and his partner could present in the courtroom. While the prosecutors only had the one eyewitness, who claimed to have only caught a glimpse of the shooter and gave description that did not even match Butler. The film presents the conclusion that the police did not actually do the work to find the actual killer and if it wasn’t for Pat McGuinness and his partner wanting to find the culprit, it would never actually be solved. This film also has a great aesthetic way of presenting characteristics of the movie as a whole, for example when filming Brenton Butler, they made sure that almost throughout the movie entirely he did not speak to put more emphasis on the first impression of Lestrade and Poncet’s of Butler as a completely detached individual; showing how Butler’s voice was denied by the injustice of the Florida legal

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