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The Thin Blue Line is a 1988 documentary film concerning the murder of a Texas police officer who had stopped a car for a routine traffic citation. The police are presented with two suspects, one a local underaged boy with a criminal record (David Ray Harris, a boy who returned to his hometown boasting that he had murdered a policeman) and the other a 28-year-old taciturn drifter with no criminal record whatsoever (Randall Dale Adams). The documentary presents testimony suggesting that the police altered, fabricated, and suppressed evidence to convict the man they wanted to be guilty, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

The film was directed by Errol Morris (who had, incidentally, spent some years before the filming as a private investigator), scored by Philip Glass, and cost about one million dollars to make. It was entered into evidence in the federal appeal but since it was marketed as a "nonfiction" film rather than a documentary, it was not entered into evidence in the case itself. For the same reason, the film was disqualified from the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Nonetheless, Adams was finally granted a retrial and released after eleven years in prison.

Harris had testified that he and Adams were together in a car and that Adams committed the murder. He later recanted this testimony; however, he never admitted guilt in a judicial setting and was never charged in the case. Harris was executed in 2004 for another murder which occurred during an attempted abduction in 1985.

The film's title comes from the prosecutor's comment during his closing argument, paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling's Tommy, that the police are the "thin blue line" separating society from anarchy.

The Thin Blue Line won Best Documentary honors from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Kansas City Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, and the National Society of Film Critics. Morris himself won an International Documentary Association Award and an Edgar Award. In December 2001, the United States' National Film Preservation Foundation declared the film "culturally significant" and announced that it would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Shortly after his release, Adams sued Morris. In an interview with Danny Yeager published in The Touchstone the summer of 2000, Adams said "Mr. Morris felt he had the exclusive rights to my life story...Therefore, it became necessary to file an injunction to sort out any legal questions on the issue. The matter was resolved before having to go before a judge. Mr. Morris reluctantly conceded that I had the sole rights to my own life. I did not sue Errol Morris for any money or any percentages of The Thin Blue Line, though the media portrayed it that way." ^[1]

Morris, for his part, remembers: "When he got out, he became very angry at the fact that he had signed a release giving me rights to his life story. And he felt as though I had stolen something from him. Maybe I had, maybe I just don't understand what it's like to be in prison for that long, for a crime you hadn't committed. In a certain sense, the whole crazy deal with the release was fueled by my relationship with his attorney. And it's a long, complicated story, but I guess when people are involved, there's always a mess somewhere." [1]

• David Harris Offender Information
• Interview with Errol Morris
• The Thin Blue Line at the Internet Movie Database
• The Thin Blue Line at Rotten Tomatoes