THE WIRE AND ALTERNATIVE STORIES OF LAW AND INEQUALITY ROBERT C. POWER* INTRODUCTION The Wire was a dramatic television series that examined the connections among crime, law enforcement, government, and business in contemporary Baltimore, Maryland.1 It was among the most critically praised television series of all time2 and continues to garner substantial academic attention in the form of scholarly articles,3 academic conferences,4 and university courses.5 One aspect * Professor, Widener University School of Law. A.B., Brown University; J.D., Northwestern University Law School. Professor Power thanks Alexander Meiklejohn and John Dernbach for their comments on an earlier draft of this Article. He also thanks Lucas Csovelak, Andrea Nappi, Gabor Ovari, Ed Sonnenberg, and Brent Johnson for research assistance. 1. Substantial information about the series is available at HBO.COM, http://www.hbo.com/ the-wire/episodes#/the-wire/index.html [hereinafter Wire HBO site]. This site contains detailed summaries of each episode. Subsequent references to specific episodes in this Article refer to the season, followed by the number of the episode counting from the beginning of season one, and then the name of the episode. For example, the first episode of season four, which introduces the four boys who serve as protagonists in season four, is The Wire: Boys of Summer (HBO television broadcast Sept. 10, 2006) [hereinafter Episode 4-38, Boys of Summer]. Additional information is available at The Wire, IMDB.COM, http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0306414/ (last visited Mar. 26, 2013) [hereinafter Wire IMDB site]. Several books contain essays and other commentaries about the series. See THE WIRE: URBAN DECAY AND AMERICAN TELEVISION (Tiffany Potter & C.W. Marshall eds., 2009) [hereinafter URBAN DECAY]; THE WIRE RE-UP (Steve Busfield & Paul Owen eds., 2009); RAFAEL ALVAREZ, THE WIRE: TRUTH BE TOLD (2004). 2. See Jacob Weisberg, The Wire on Fire, SLATE (Sept. 13, 2006, 5:44 PM), http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_big_idea/2006/09/the_wire_on_fire.html (“The Wire . is surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America.”); see also Ted Nannicelli, It’s All Connected: Televisual Narrative Complexity, in URBAN DECAY, supra note 1, at 190 (citing and analyzing the reasons for critical praise); THE WIRE RE-UP, supra note 1, at 4-11 (discussing “[w]hy The Wire is the greatest TV show ever made” and collecting favorable commentaries by crime novelists (italics added)); Bennett Capers, Commentary Symposium, The HBO Series The Wire: Introduction, 8 OHIO ST. J. CRIM. L. 431, 431 (2011) (describing the show as “amazingly good”); Mark Bowden, The Angriest Man in Television, ATLANTIC (Jan. 1, 2008, 12:00 PM), available at http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/01/the-angriest-man-in-television/ 306581/ (describing the series as “brilliant”); Helena Sheehan & Sheamus Sweeney, The Wire and the World: Narrative and Metanarrative, JUMP CUT, no. 51, 2009, at 1, http://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc51.2009/Wire/index.html (“[c]onsidered by many critics to be the best television drama series ever”). 3. See James M. Keneally, Jury Nullification, Race, and The Wire, 55 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 941, 942 (2010/2011); see also Jason Mittel, All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic, ELECTRONIC BOOK REV. (Mar. 18, 2011), http://www.electronicbookreview. 426 INDIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 46:425 that has intrigued legal academics is that the series contained numerous depictions of law. These include examples of legally questionable searches, evidentiary issues, interrogations, and professional responsibility problems.6 Some of the most memorable legal aspects involve various forms of inequality. The executive producer and moving force behind The Wire was David Simon.7 The series was Simon’s third foray into crime and society in Baltimore.8 com/thread/firstperson/serial; Socio-Spatial Imagination and Jargons of Authenticity: The Wire and Baltimore—the City America Left Behind, CITY (Jan. 15, 2011, 3:15 PM), http://www.city- analysis.net/2011/01/15/socio-spatial-imagination-and-jargons-of-authenticity-the-wire-and- baltimore-the-city-america-left-behind/ (discussing The Wire as literature and social science fiction, respectively). 4. See Esther Addley, Unravelling The Wire: Academics Dissect Social Science of Cult TV Show, GUARDIAN (Nov. 27, 2009, 2:19 PM), http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2009/nov/27/ the-wire-conference-leeds (meeting sponsored by the University of Manchester in Leeds, U.K.); Symposium, Heart of the City: Black Urban Life on The Wire (Jan. 29-30, 2009), http://sitemaker. umich.edu/ heart_of_the_city/about_symposium (meeting at the University of Michigan). 5. See Drake Bennett, This Will Be on the Midterm. You Feel Me?, SLATE (Mar. 24, 2010, 7:08 AM), http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/03/this_will_be_on_the_midterm_ you_feel_me.html (discussing courses related to The Wire at Harvard, University of California—Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury and providing links for courses at several other universities). 6. See The Wire: Backwash (HBO television broadcast July 13, 2003) (depicting a couple of the officers using a listening device placed in a tennis ball, which provides information attributed to an informant named “Fuzzy Dunlop”); The Wire: Duck and Cover (HBO television broadcast July 27, 2003) (same); see also C.W. Marshall & Tiffany Potter, The Life and Times of Fuzzy Dunlop: Herc and the Modern Urban Crime Environment, DARKMATTER (May 29, 2009), http://www.darkmatter101org/site/2009/05/29/the-life-and-times-of-fuzzy-dunlop-herc-and-the- modern-urban-crime-environment/. Much of the plot in the fifth season surrounds illegal interception of cellphone messages. See The Wire: React Quotes (HBO television broadcast Feb. 3, 2008) [hereinafter Episode 5-55, React Quotes] through The Wire: Late Editions (HBO television broadcast Mar. 2, 2008) [hereinafter Episode 5-59, Late Editions]. Officers use force and other illegal means to try to obtain confessions. E.g., The Wire: One Arrest (HBO television broadcast July 21, 2002) [hereinafter Episode 1-7, One Arrest]; The Wire: Dead Soldiers (HBO television broadcast Oct. 3, 2004) [hereinafter Episode 3-28, Dead Soldiers]; The Wire: More with Less (HBO television broadcast Jan. 6, 2008) [hereinafter Episode 5-51, More with Less]. A number of investigations are frustrated because chain of custody errors render the evidence useless at trial. See The Wire: The Dickensian Aspect (HBO television broadcast Feb. 10, 2008) [hereinafter Episode 5-56, The Dickensian Aspect]. There are professional responsibility issues relating to prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges during every season. The most noteworthy is near the end of the series, when prosecutors and defense attorney Maury Levy reach a deal in which Levy’s clients plead guilty so that Levy can avoid prosecution for bribing a grand jury prosecutor. Episode 5-59, Late Editions, supra. 7. See Wire IMDB site, supra note 1. 8. See DAVID SIMON, HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS (Owl Books 2006) (1991) [hereinafter SIMON, HOMICIDE]; DAVID SIMON & EDWARD BURNS, THE CORNER: A YEAR 2013] THE WIRE 427 He describes The Wire as illustrating the existence of “two Americas—separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms.”9 His flip suggestion of a remedy for the increasing segregation of rich from poor is to undo the last thirty-five years, apparently referring to the aggressive capitalism that has increased the gap between the wealthy and the underclass since the mid-1970s.10 In law, we would have to go back at least that far. In the 1960s, progressives and other supporters of economic reform worked to equalize society by increasing public services for the poor. Some groups worked for the enactment of legislation, such as the laws that were part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.”11 Others attempted to use the Equal Protection Clause to create a more balanced society, building on Brown v. Board of Education12 to require that state and local governments distribute funds equitably to finance public education. That attempt failed in San Antonio Independent School District v. IN THE LIFE OF AN INNER-CITY NEIGHBORHOOD (1997) (Ed Burns, a former Baltimore police officer and school teacher, was also a writer-producer on The Wire.). C.W. Marshall & Tiffany Potter, “I Am the American Dream”: Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction, in URBAN DECAY, supra note 1, at 10-11. The broadcast series Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC television broadcast Jan. 31, 1993 to May 21, 1999) was based on SIMON, HOMICIDE, supra, and Simon served as one of the show’s writers. THE CORNER became an HBO mini-series, The Corner (HBO television broadcast Apr. 16, 2000 to May 21, 2000). 9. David Simon, Two Americas, in THE WIRE RE-UP, supra note 1, at 260, 262. Simon expounds on the decline of working class America and the great industrial cities in a variety of contexts. See, e.g., Margaret Talbot, Stealing Life: The Crusader Behind “The Wire,” NEW YORKER, Oct. 22, 2007, at 150, available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/ 10/22/071022fa_fact_talbot (quoting David Simon, The Wire’s creator, as saying, “[R]aw, unencumbered capitalism’ devalues human beings . ‘Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less.’”). 10. Jesse Walker, David Simon Says, REASON (Oct. 2004), available at http://www. reason.com/news/show/29273.html (“For 35 years, you’ve systematically deindustrialized these cities. You’ve rendered them inhospitable to the working class, economically. You have marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade.”); see also Sheehan & Sweeney, supra note 2 (discussing The Wire as presenting a Marxist argument).