The message of this movie may be incompetent and corrupt legal system but when they search Sabich's home for carpet fibers, they should have looked for the hammer too. It was right in the house. It would have made him look guilty but the wife would have been a valid suspect too.
shareThis was explained in the movie. Here's a link to the most recent post asking this very same question; you can find even more if you check the other threads on this board.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100404/board/nest/56150066
The only second chance you get is to make the same mistake twice. - David Mamet
That doesn't answer anything. When a head gets bashed with a heavy, blunt object, the first thing the investigators round up is all the hammers in the house and on the property. All of them. Trust me on this one.
They would have found it.
"It puts the lotion on it's skin, it does this whenever it's told."
Yes, but you're overlooking the fact that Rusty was a prosecutor–an assistant district attorney, no less, and the new prosecutors know it. He said so himself in the movie, they know he won't be stupid enough to bring the weapon back to his house–remember, they think that he is the murderer, and he knows all the tricks of the trade, the ins-and-outs; he knows that most convictions come from killers who don't properly dispose of the weapon. Now, do you think the new prosecutors would think that Rusty would make such a careless and amateur mistake like bringing the weapon back home? If you were the new prosecutor and you were faced with the choice of searching the house of a professional lawyer looking for a murder weapon that the suspected killer has most likely ditched and then admitting that you didn't even find a trace of it in court, would you do it?
As an added point, Scott Turow, the author of the novel, is a lawyer–not only that, he used to be a prosecutor, too. This isn't the kind of novel, or movie, where cheap thrills and twists are added at the expense of credibility. I think I'll choose to trust Scott Turow on this one.
The only second chance you get is to make the same mistake twice. - David Mamet
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