How could they ever convict . . . (spoilers, of course)

"Miles may not have had much brains, but he had too much years experience as a detective to be caught down a blind alley by the guy he was tailing with his gun at his hip and his overcoat buttoned!
But he'd have gone up there with you, angel. He was just dumb enough for that!"

One of the best lines of this brilliantly written film. It continually astounds me just how good "The Maltese Falcon" is.

Not all the blame *should* fall on her. She only killed Archer. And yes, the DA could get a conviction on Wilmer for Miles, too, but it wouldn't be in character for either the DA or the Lieutenant. They both made it clear they wanted to get at the truth *and* get everyone involved.

In addition, the Lieutenant has a hard-on for bringing down Spade, whom he is convinced is dirty. The woman with whom Spade was obviously involved would do, even if he weren't now the most credible witness in the whole shebang. Look at how he just plops her fur coat on her shoulders and gives her a little shove when arresting her. He's immune.

Besides, most of that stuff from Gutman about how they were going to make Wilmer the fall guy was 1. a lot of lying back and forth about how the rest of them were going to amicably split the loot from the sale of the Falcon and 2. entirely predicated on getting the real thing. Since they didn't get it, there's no way Gutman and Cairo will stick to the deal of protecting Brigid, too. They'll just say they don't know who killed Archer, which makes Spade's story look more credible, not less. That way, if they make bail (because how much can the DA really make stick on them?), they're free of both Wilmer and Brigid, and can run off to Istanbul on their hopeless quest.

The thing is that Brigid's allure is based on her appearing to be innocent, but she's anything but innocent and she doesn't have the money to get a good lawyer who will help her maintain the facade in court. All it takes is counting up the guys she was involved in just in San Francisco alone to kill her reputation with a jury. So, she's basically screwed. It's really more a case, as Spade puts it, of whether she hangs or gets a long prison prison sentence.

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I feel like a jury would convict her, partly because of the repeated lies. Effie would corroborate Spade's story, and then there's the stories of the police officers who tried to arrest Spade. While there might not be a lot of hard evidence, with so many witnesses and facts abounding throughout the place, Spade's true story would be hard to cut through with one of Brigid's lies. She lied often, but never really well, and Sam would dismantle anything she threw out there.

The bottom line is that the hard evidence might not be there, but Effie and Sam alone could produce a chain of events so convoluted that their explanation would be the only logical one to follow. Combine that with Brigid's duplicity, and she would look bad to any jury. As a final nail in the proverbial (possibly literal) coffin, the police probably picked up Gutman and Cairo as well. 10 to 1 Kaspar Gutman tries to trade Brigid for a lighter sentence (and 10 to 1 Sam manages to get him to implicate Brigid before getting his deal in hard ink).