Chewbacca defense
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The Chewbacca defense is a fictional legal strategy used in the South Park episode 27 "Chef Aid", which premiered on October 7, 1998 as the fourteenth episode of the second season. The aim of the argument is to deliberately confuse the jury. The concept satirized attorney Johnnie Cochran's closing argument defending O. J. Simpson in his murder trial.
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[edit] Origin
In the episode, Chef discovers that Alanis Morissette's (fictional) hit song "Stinky Britches" is the same as a song he wrote years ago, before he abandoned his musical aspirations. Chef contacts a "major record company" executive, seeking only to have his name credited as the composer of "Stinky Britches." Chef's claim is substantiated by a twenty-year-old recording of Chef performing the song.
The record company refuses, and furthermore hires Johnnie Cochran, who files a lawsuit against Chef for harassment. In court, Cochran resorts to his "famous" Chewbacca Defense, which he "used during the Simpson trial", according to Stan Marsh.
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This last statement is a parody of Johnnie Cochran's closing arguments in the O. J. Simpson murder case where he states to the jury: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," in reference to an earlier point in the trial when prosecutor Christopher Darden asked Mr. Simpson to try on a bloody glove found at the murder scene, which he did unsuccessfully. [2]
Cochran's defense is successful and the jury finds Chef guilty of "harassing a major record label" and sets his punishment as either a two million dollar fine to be paid within twenty-four hours or, failing that, four years in prison (the judge initially sentences him to eight million years).
Ultimately a "Chef Aid" benefit concert is organized to raise money for Chef to hire Johnnie Cochran for his own lawsuit against the record company. At the concert Johnnie Cochran experiences a change of heart and offers to represent Chef pro bono. He again successfully uses the Chewbacca Defense, this time to defeat the record company and make them acknowledge Chef's authorship of their song. In the second use of the Chewbacca Defense, he ends by taking out a monkey puppet and shouting "Here, look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!" causing a juror's head to explode.
[edit] Usage
The Associated Press obituary for Cochran mentioned the Chewbacca Defense parody as one of the ways in which the attorney had entered pop culture.[3]
Criminologist Dr. Thomas O'Connor says that when DNA evidence shows "inclusion", that is, does not exonerate a client by exclusion from the DNA sample provided, "About the only thing you can do is attack the lab for its (lack of) quality assurance and proficiency testing, or use a 'Chewbacca Defense' …and try to razzle-dazzle the jury about how complex and complicated the other side's evidence or probability estimates are."[4] Forensic scientist Erin Kenneally has argued that court challenges to digital evidence frequently use the Chewbacca Defense per se, in that they present multiple alternative explanations of forensic evidence obtained from computers and internet providers to raise the reasonable doubt understood by a jury. Kenneally also presents methods that can be used to rebut a Chewbacca Defense.[5][6] Kenneally and colleague Anjali Swienton have presented this topic before the Florida State Court System and at the 2005 American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting.[7]
The term has also seen use in political commentary; Ellis Weiner wrote in The Huffington Post that Dinesh D'Souza was using the Chewbacca defense in criticism of new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, defining it as when "someone asserts his claim by saying something so patently nonsensical that the listener's brain shuts down completely."[8]
In the Star Wars universe, Chewbacca did not live on Endor at all. The false claim that he had lived on Endor is a reference to an argument between Cartman and Kyle in the episode Pink Eye; it could also refer to Star Wars creator George Lucas' original intention to use the Wookiee home planet, Kashyyyk, for the sequences that ultimately featured Endor in Return of the Jedi.
[edit] See also
- Chef Aid
- Idiot defense
- Twinkie defense
- Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
- Non sequitur, a form of logical fallacy
- Reductio ad absurdum, disproof by an absurd conclusion
- Ignoratio elenchi aka Red herring, another form of logical fallacy
- Enthymeme for an analysis of Cochran's logic
- Price of tea in China, an expression which is used to denote something which is unrelated to the current topic of discussion
- SCO-Linux controversies, a long-running legal case where obfuscation was used
[edit] References
- ^ Audio of the beginning of the scene is available.
- ^ CNN Interactive: Video Almanac - 1995.
- ^ "Cochran was rare attorney turned pop culture figure", Associated Press, March 30, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-01-27.
- ^ Thomas O'Connor, Ph.D., Austin Peay State University Center at Ft. Campbell and North Carolina Wesleyan College. DNA Typing and Identification. Retrieved on 2007-01-27.
- ^ Erin Kenneally, M.F.S., J.D.. Applying Admissibility, Reliability to Technology. Florida State Courts. Retrieved on 2007-01-27.
- ^ Anjali R. Swienton, M.F.S., J.D. Erin Kenneally, M.F.S., J.D.. Poking the Wookie: the Chewbacca Defense in Digital Evidence Cases. SciLaw Forensics, Ltd.. Retrieved on 2007-01-27.
- ^ Upcoming AAFS Annual Meeting. CERIAS, Purdue University. Retrieved on 2007-01-27.
- ^ Ellis Weiner. "D is for Diabolical", The Huffington Post, January 24, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-01-27.
[edit] Further reading
- Arp, Robert (December 2006). "The Chewbacca Defense: A South Park Logic Lesson", in Arp, Robert: South Park and Philosophy: You Know, I Learned Something Today. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-1405161602.
[edit] External links
- Audio recording of the Chewbacca Defense - southparkstudios.com
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