Questions about the movie Fracture (2007) have been presented before, mainly because of the double jeopardy gimmick it uses. Like here :Is the interpretation of Double Jeopardy realistic in the movie Fracture?
Plot synopsis for those who haven't seen it (it may be a little long but there's a point to it. No need to read any of it if you know the movie, of course, but I am trying to highlight something that I don't know if it is of any relevance in the eye of the law or not :
Hopkins' wife was having an affair with a police detective.
Hopkins shoots his wife in the face at home, alone.
His gardening staff hear the shots, but don't actually see the fact. I don't quite know why and how it is established that it was a hostage situation without any contact between the guy and the police, but it is, and lo and behold, the hostage negotiator happens to be Affair Guy, Billy Burke. Hopkins lets only him inside, they both drop their guns, and he confesses the crime to Burke. Only then Burke realizes who the victim is (since he didn't know the woman by her real name or any detail, it was that kind of deal ) and super enraged beats Hopkins up. He really wants him to pay so he also leads (or is present) to the written confession Hopkins later gives at the station. The wife is STILL ALIVE, but in a coma as a result of the fact.
Ambitious Prosecutor Guy Who Happens To Be Leaving For a Lucrative Private Firm Job Soon (Ryan Gosling) is led to believe that he has it in the pocket: a verbal and a written confession, and the gun used in the crime. On top of that, Hopkins chose to represent himself in court even if he is not a lawyer. Easy peasy.
Except not, because the gun that was in Hopkins' possession , regularly purchased, 'has never been fired before', it's not the (attempted) murder weapon. And Hopkins unravels that Lt. Billy Burke was having an affair with his wife, so both confessions, even the written one , are discarded. The prosecutor goes through all sorts of investigations on his own time to try and acquire new evidence, but the judge eventually has to agree with Hopkins' motion for acquittal under California Penal code 1118.1 : insufficient evidence for conviction as he had no (attempted) murder weapon and the confession he gave was deemed to be invalid .
Now a free man, Hopkins wants to tie loose ends and decides to terminate his wife's life support.
Prosecutor Gosling, who had spent nights by her hospital bed and is broken by this miscarriage of justice, goes around like a lunatic begging for a court order to stop the euthanasia, eventually getting it signed by one that happens to be the dad of the Cold Hearted Corporate Lawyer he happened to be banging (the girl, not her dad, that we know of) and that signs it saying plainly that it wouldn't hold up in appeal.
Prosecutor Gosling then drives off to the hospital (don't ask why he didn't phone, telex it, whatever), waves the court order around, but since he looks positively unhinged (and Hopkins had a RESTRAINING ORDER ON HIM filed the moment he was acquitted ) the hospital staff tackles him to the ground and he is forced to eat a floor sandwich while watching euthanasia being performed on Hopkins's wife.
However, this way Hopkins apparently signed his demise, because just as he was about to leave town , Gosling confronts him at his own house and reveals he figured out the trick that the audience realized an hour earlier and somehow the police never entertained as investigative hypothesis : Hopkins had swapped guns with Lt. Billy Burke, twice, once before shooting his wife (so he shot her WITH the detective's stolen gun, not his own), and once after as the policeman was by his lover's bloodied body (thus Hopkins got his own gun back and left the attempted murder weapon to Burke who unknowingly removed it from the scene when he took it back).
An overconfident Hopkins fully confesses the murder to Gosling (who is on his own with him, being the sole witness of this confession) saying that even now that he knows the truth and where/which the actual weapon is, he still can't do anything about it because of Double Jeopardy.
However, apparently he's wrong, because now his wife is dead, and that's Murder, a different crime he can be tried for. Not just that, but they can pull the bullet from the wife's corpse, now that she is actually a corpse, and match it with the correct one, and prove...that it's Billy Burke's gun? Anyway, whatever.
What I was getting at with this overlong synopsis is:
at the end of the movie, Gosling is the prosecutor of the new murder trial.
...would that be possible in real life? Isn't him just a bit too 'involved' in everything to be the lead prosecutor? I realize that he can probably make his own case without calling himself as a witness, but wouldn't he be a hostile witness for the defense too or... something? From a complete layman's perspective like mine, something feels 'wrong' about this idea, but I wonder if technically it could happen.
I'd appreciate any input on the subject, thank you! It's probably outside the scope of this space to riff on any other legal 'imprecision', but of course feel free if helps.
