3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets: A look back at the 'Loud Music Trial' that dovetailed with the birth of Black Lives Matter

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus.

Amidst daily reports about the trial of policeman Derek Chauvin, the gruesome death of George Floyd, and this week’s police shooting of Daunte Wright in Minnesota, it may seem perverse to revisit a different racially-charged trial from 2015.  

Yet, the film, 3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets, as well as being a compelling real-life courtroom drama, offers some clarity about race and injustice in the pre-Trump era. The film is currently available from the Impact Series streaming service and on Hollywood Suite on April 26.

The film chronicles what CNN dubbed the “loud music trial.”  On November 23, 2012,  Michael Dunn, a 45-year-old white software engineer, during a dispute about loud rap music coming from a red Jeep Durango in a Jacksonville parking lot, fired a revolver repeatedly into a car with four African-American teens, killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis. 

When Davis’s fiancé returned from the store where she had bought wine, Dunn sped away, leaving three boys with their dying friend.  A witness memorized his licence plate and he was arrested at his home a day later. 

The film’s title indicates the brevity of the interaction — from around 7:30 to 7:33 on a Friday evening — and the estimated number of bullets fired. British director Marc Silver’s tautly edited film, which won a special jury award at Sundance in 2015, was picked up by HBO and aired later that year.

Convicted killer Michael Dunn

The trial led to local protests and international media attention. It took place at the infancy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was launched on social media following the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the shooting death of another 17-year-old Florida native, Trayvon Martin. BLM became a national activist network a year later, following police killing of a third African-American teen, Michael Brown, of Ferguson, Missouri.

Zimmerman’s acquittal happened in the summer of 2013, between Dunn’s first trial, which ended in a partial verdict,  and his second trial in the fall, when the jury convicted him of first degree murder. He is now serving life in prison without parole.

Filmmaker Silver (Who Is Dayani Cristal?) and his crew gained permission to film inside the Jacksonville court house, as long as they did not film the jury. 

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

That means we watch, along with Davis’ parents, the testimony of Dunn and his nervous fiancé, Rhonda Rouer (a key figure in contradicting Dunn’s testimony about claiming to see Davis wielding a weapon). We hear from Jordan’s three friends in the car, cautiously precise in their answers. 

The film refutes any assumptions that crime and racism are the burdens of the poor and disenfranchised: Both Dunn and the boys in the car were comfortable and middle-class. Outside the courtroom, the filmmaker  interviews Jordan’s grieving, thoughtful  parents, Ron Davis and Lucy McBath - the latter of whom subsequently became a Congresswoman in Newt Gingrich’s old Georgia district, running on a gun control ticket. 

We spend time getting to know Jordan’s friends, troubled by their loss and their own near-death experience. While no one from Dunn’s supporters are interviewed, we hear revealing excerpts from phone recordings of Dunn’s prison phone calls to Rouer, his claims of victimhood and denials. Dunn sounds incredulous that he has been imprisoned, and blames Davis “100 percent” for what happened.

In the duel between the attorneys, viewers can find a second villain in the defense team’s Cory Strolla, who, while fulfillling his legal responsibility to vigorously defend his client, denies racial elements of the case while insisting  that Dunn feared for his life and implies, without evidence, that the teens were violent instigators who threw away  a weapon.

From the other side, prosecutor John Guy (who also helped to prosecute the George Zimmerman case) frames  the defense’s argument this way: When you can’t argue the facts, argue the law; when you can’t argue the law, argue the facts. And when you can’t argue either, put someone else on trial.

3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets. Written and directed by Marc Silver. The film is currently available for streaming on demand from the documentary streaming service, Impactseries.net or April 26 on the movie subscription service, Hollywood Suite.