Chewbacca defense

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Johnnie Cochran using the Chewbacca Defense against Chef in South Park.

The Chewbacca defense is a fictional legal strategy used in the South Park episode "Chef Aid", which premiered on October 7, 1998 as the fourteenth episode of the second season. The concept satirized attorney Johnnie Cochran's closing argument defending O.J. Simpson in his murder trial. "Chewbacca Defense", meaning a defense consisting solely of nonsensical arguments meant to confuse a jury, has since been occasionally applied outside of references to South Park.

1 South Park appearance
2 Usage
3 See also
4 Further reading
5 References
6 External links

[edit] South Park appearance

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In the episode, Chef discovers that Alanis Morissette's (fictional) hit song "Stinky Britches" is the same as a song he wrote years ago, before he abandoned his musical aspirations. Chef contacts a "major record company" executive, seeking only to have his name credited as the composer of "Stinky Britches." Chef's claim is substantiated by a twenty-year-old recording of Chef performing the song.

The record company refuses, and furthermore hires Johnnie Cochran, who files a lawsuit against Chef for harassment. In court, Cochran resorts to his "famous" Chewbacca Defense, which he "used during the Simpson trial", according to Gerald Broflovski.

"Cochran: Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, Chef's attorney would certainly want you to believe that his client wrote "Stinky Britches" ten years ago. And they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself! But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
Gerald Broflovski: Dammit!
Chef: What?
Gerald: He's using the Chewbacca Defense!
Cochran: Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests."^[1]

This last statement is a parody on Johnnie Cochran's closing arguments in the Simpson Murder trial where he states to the jury: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," in reference to an earlier point in the trial when prosecutor Christopher Darden asked Mr. Simpson to try on a bloody glove found at the murder scene, which he does unsuccessfully. ^[2]

Cochran's use of this defense (which is ironic, since he represents the plaintiff) is so successful that the jury finds Chef guilty of "harassing a major record label" and sets his punishment as either a two million dollar fine to be paid within twenty-four hours or, failing that, four years in prison.

The coup de grâce: "Look at the silly monkey!"

Ultimately a "Chef Aid" benefit concert is organized to raise money for Chef to hire Johnnie Cochran for his own lawsuit against the record company. The concert (a parody of Live Aid) features his old showbiz friends—Elton John, Meat Loaf, Ozzy Osbourne (who kills Kenny by biting his head off), Rancid, Joe Strummer, Ween, Primus and others (the real-life artists recorded songs for the episode and accompanying album). At the concert Johnnie Cochran experiences a change of heart (à la How The Grinch Stole Christmas) and offers to represent Chef pro bono. He again successfully uses the Chewbacca Defense, this time to defeat the record company and make them acknowledge Chef's authorship of their song. In the second use of the Chewbacca Defense, he ends by suddenly producing a monkey and shouting "Here, look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!" causing a juror's head to explode.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Usage

The Associated Press obituary for Cochran cited the Chewbacca defense parody of his style as one of the ways in which the attorney had entered pop culture.^[3]

The Chewbacca Defense has been applied to real world legal strategies in the media and by some legal experts. Commentator Michael Masnick of Techdirt Corporate Intelligence noted in 2003 that Trojan horse defense was becoming a key defense strategy in computer crime cases, particularly highlighting a claim made by a Slashdot story poster^[4] regarding the SCO v. IBM case:

“

…because juries don't understand technical jargon, we're getting closer and closer to situations where lawyers are going to employ the Chewbacca Defense, as created for South Park. Already, Slashdot has suggested that SCO is using a Chewbacca Defense in their case. Basically, you just have a convincing lawyer make up a bunch of technical stuff, make connections that don't have anything to do with one another, point out that it does not make sense, and therefore, the case should get thrown out. The legal strategy of the twenty-first century: trojan horses and Chewbacca.^[5]

”

Criminologist Dr. Thomas O'Connor says that when DNA evidence shows "inclusion", that is, does not exonerate a client by exclusion from the DNA sample provided, "About the only thing you can do is attack the lab for its (lack of) quality assurance and proficiency testing, or use a 'Chewbacca defense' …and try to razzle-dazzle the jury about how complex and complicated the other side's evidence or probability estimates are."^[6] Forensic scientist Erin Kenneally has argued that court challenges to digital evidence frequently use the Chewbacca defense per se, in that they present multiple alternative explanations of forensic evidence obtained from computers and internet providers to raise the reasonable doubt understood by a jury. Kenneally also presents methods that can be used to rebut a Chewbacca defense.^[7]^[8] Kenneally and colleague Anjali Swienton have presented this topic before the Florida State Court System and at the 2005 American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting.^[9]

Perhaps less seriously, ZDNet's Munir Kotadia proposed a Chewbacca defense for cases involving Microsoft Windows, writing, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Microsoft Windows. It is the most popular operating system in the world. But Windows is full of security holes, cannot be trusted, and costs lots of money. This does not make sense."^[10] The term has also seen use in political commentary; Ellis Weiner wrote in The Huffington Post that Dinesh D'Souza was using the Chewbacca defense in criticism of new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, defining it as when "someone asserts his claim by saying something so patently nonsensical that the listener's brain shuts down completely."^[11]

[edit] See also

Chef Aid
Idiot defense
Twinkie defense
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
Non sequitur, a form of logical fallacy
Ignoratio elenchi, another form of logical fallacy
Enthymeme for an analysis of Cochran's logic
Price of tea in China, an expression which is used to denote something which is unrelated to the current topic of discussion
SCO-Linux controversies, a long-running legal case where obfuscation was used

[edit] Further reading

Arp, Robert (December 2006). "The Chewbacca Defense: A South Park Logic Lesson", in Arp, Robert: South Park and Philosophy: You Know, I Learned Something Today. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-1405161602.