"It's a practical impossibility to charge two people for the same crime." - something this movie legit posits, that I'm pretty sure is not remotely true.

One of many sordid adult whodunnit legal thrillers of the '80s and early '90s with a twist ending (though my first thought always goes to the Jeff Bridges/Glenn Close one "Jagged Edge"), an intelligently played, somewhat plausible Hitchcockian procedural that shoots straight down the middle in all aspects, and gets the job done just fine (the Alan J. Pakula guarantee, in other words).

Buoyed by a full house of formidable character actors (Brian Dennehy, Paul Winfield, Bonnie Bedelia), hey-it's-that-guys (yes there's a difference - Joe Grifasi, Sab Shimono, Greta Scacchi) and before-they-were-stars (John Spencer and Bradley Whitford, Jesse Bradford, Joseph Mazzello, Jeffrey Wright), with Raul Julia as usual earning MVP, and good ol' Harrison Ford appropriately outraged as always in his long career run of harried family men (plus a little bonus performance juice of acting slightly sinister too in order to make us question his innocence).

Kind of a trilogy, you might say, of movies where Harrison Ford might be a murderer. Make a night of it and marathon this with "The Fugitive" and "What Lies Beneath". "The Fugitive" seems like it was the apotheosis of these murder mystery thrillers that were so popular back then - it elevated them all to an even smarter and even more crowd-pleasing level of big-canvas excellence, and thus the trend peaked and faded thereafter. "Presumed Innocent" is like a more modest-scaled practice run for that movie.

*also this property has become an oddly enduring IP, for something so unremarkable. It was based on a book, there was a 1992 spin-off miniseries focusing on Raul Julia's character (there played by Hector Elizondo), a 2011 TV-movie sequel on TNT with Ford replaced by Bill Pullman and an upcoming Apple+ miniseries remake written by David E. Kelley and set to star Jake Gyllenhaal as Ford's guy. Meanwhile other Harrison Ford programmers over the years that I enjoyed even more like "Six Days Seven Nights", "K-19: The Widowmaker" and "Morning Glory" are still just one-and-done antiques lost to time that nobody else cares about. Injustice.