A bystander's dark, jittery video will allow a San Bernardino County jury to witness a sheriff's deputy opening fire on an unarmed off-duty airman, and to stop, pause and rewind the frenzy that ended with three muzzle flashes and the deputy on trial this week for attempted voluntary manslaughter.
The district attorney thought the digital video recording, shot after a high-speed chase through Montclair and Chino in January 2006, was such damning evidence that Deputy Ivory John Webb Jr. became the first law enforcement officer ever charged in an on-duty shooting in the county.
But jurors may not be as convinced. With television and the Internet awash in raw, amateur video, from Osama bin Laden's terrorist rants broadcast on Al Jazeera to the fictional lonelygirl15 videos on YouTube, audiences have become more skeptical and sophisticated about the images they see, and more open to alternative interpretations, legal and film experts say.
"We know historically that documentary film is dominated by the voice -- that we're very prone to follow what it is that we are being told about what we are seeing," said Michael Renov, a documentary scholar at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.
This especially could be true about the video recording in Webb's trial, and the battle between the prosecution and defense: "The lawyer gets to provide the voice-over," he said.
After watching the video of the Chino shooting, Renov drew a parallel to Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film "Rashomon." In that famous Japanese film, an event was shown from different perspectives and narrated by different characters, who each gave plausible explanations of what had transpired.
The low lighting, scant detail and shaky camera in the Chino shooting footage, Renov said, could play into the personal fears of members of the jury as they try to put themselves in Webb's shoes to determine whether he committed a crime.
"It's all dark, it's murky, it's hard to know what's going on," Renov said. "The less clear-cut the image ... the more possibilities there are for creating a compelling narrative that can help make the case you want it to make."
Webb, who left the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department last year, is set to go on trial Monday for attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm for shooting Elio Carrion, an Air Force police officer who was home on leave after duty in Iraq.
