A Time to Kill: Characters, Themes and the Law of the Case
Chapter Sixty-One
Syllabus topic 3.1.3, "A Time to Kill - John Grisham Chapters 11 and 13"
Pages 300 to 304 of 406
In one line
The novel's people are arranged so that nobody is simply right: a father who murdered, a lawyer who is ambitious as well as decent, a prosecutor who wants a career, and a jury that acquits for a reason it cannot state.
The characters
Carl Lee Hailey. A black factory worker in Ford County, Mississippi, and the father of Tonya. He is not presented as a man out of control. He decides, in advance, that a Mississippi jury may not convict two white men of what they did to his daughter, and he acts on that judgment. That deliberateness is what makes him sympathetic and what destroys his legal defence at the same time. He is also, throughout the case, harder-headed than his lawyer about what is happening to him and why.
Jake Brigance. A young white lawyer in the town, not rich, with a wife and a small daughter, who takes the case knowing what it will cost. He is decent and he is also ambitious: Grisham lets the reader see that the case is the biggest thing that has happened to his practice, and does not pretend otherwise. What is admirable in him is not purity of motive but that he keeps going after the Klan makes it personal, and that he keeps the case belonging to his client.
Rufus Buckley. The district attorney. Able, aggressive, and openly using the prosecution as a step towards higher office. He is the novel's reminder that the machinery on the other side is also being driven by somebody's career.
Lucien Wilbanks. Jake's disbarred former partner and mentor, a drunk with a good mind and no scruples, who supplies the tactics Jake will not think of himself. He is the character through whom the novel says what it thinks about how cases are actually won.
Harry Rex Vonner. A divorce lawyer, coarse and loyal, who does the work nobody writes about. He and Lucien between them make the point that a defence is a team and not an orator.
Tonya Hailey. The child. She is almost absent from the book after the opening, and the same criticism can be made here as of Fanny in Joseph Andrews: the person the story is about has the least to say in it.
The themes
Race. The novel's foundation. The crime, the fear that the rapists would not be convicted, the composition of the jury pool, the failure of the change of venue application, the revival of the Klan, and the framing of the closing argument are all racial facts, and the book does not pretend the trial could be understood without them.
Revenge against justice. The title is from Ecclesiastes, from the passage about a time to kill and a time to heal, and the book's question is whether there is such a time. Carl Lee's act is revenge. What the jury gives him is an acquittal. Whether the second makes the first justice is left with the reader.
A Time to Kill: Characters, Themes and the Law of the Case
The law as a machine that can be steered but not trusted. Every legal step in the book is fought for advantage: the choice of court, the change of venue, the selection of the jury, the choice of experts. The novel's realism lies in showing that the outcome depends on those manoeuvres at least as much as on the merits.
Whose case is it. When a civil rights organisation offers money and its own lawyers, the question becomes whether Carl Lee is a client or a cause. Keeping him a client is one of the things Jake does for him, and it is the theme most often missed in answers.
The cost of doing right. Jake's house, his family's safety and his practice are all damaged. The novel is careful that the price is real and is paid by people who did not choose it.
The law of the case, in four points
One. The charge. Capital murder. Two killings, in a public building, of persons in custody, with a deputy wounded. Nothing about the facts is in doubt.
Two. The only available defence. Insanity, under the M'Naghten formula: a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, such that the accused did not know the nature and quality of the act, or did not know that it was wrong. The defence has to be established, because sanity is presumed.
Three. Why the defence is weak on these facts. Because of the planning. A man who obtains a weapon, learns the movements of his targets, chooses a position and waits has done something very difficult to describe as not knowing what he was doing or that it was wrong. The expert evidence is a contest, and the honest reader can see which side has the better of it as a matter of law.
Four. What the verdict really is. An acquittal reached on a moral question rather than a medical one. The term is jury nullification: a jury declines to convict although the law and evidence, strictly applied, require it. It cannot be argued for openly, it is not a right, and it cannot be corrected, because an acquittal is final.
The comparison that will earn marks
This paper sets four trials. Putting this one beside the others is the most useful thing a candidate can do with it.
| Trial | The rule applied | What actually decided it |
|---|---|---|
| Shylock against Antonio | A valid bond, strictly construed | A construction nobody intended, then a statute about aliens |
| Bardell against Pickwick | Breach of promise, damages at large | Advocacy, staging, and attorneys running the case for costs |
| The trial of Hetty Sorrel | A statute presuming murder from concealment | A presumption that reversed the burden of proof, with counsel silenced |
| The trial of Carl Lee Hailey | The insanity defence | A jury deciding what it thought was right and using the defence as the door |
A Time to Kill: Characters, Themes and the Law of the Case
The sentence that uses the table. In all four the rule and the result come apart, but only in the last does the gap open in the accused's favour, and only in the last is the gap opened by ordinary people rather than by a court.
What beginners get wrong
They say Carl Lee was insane. The novel does not say so, and the planning tells against it. He is acquitted on that ground; that is not the same thing.
They make Jake a hero without qualification. He is decent, and the case is also the making of his career, and Grisham shows both.
They leave out the jury room. The single most important scene for understanding the verdict is the one in which a juror asks the others what they would have done.
They treat the Klan as background colour. The intimidation is what makes the change of venue application matter and what tests everybody in the book.
They forget MU's own question. February 2026 asked how Jake helps Carl Lee get justice. The answer must engage with the word justice and not merely narrate the case.
A worked answer
Question. "Discuss the theme of justice in A Time to Kill."
Paragraph one, the position. The novel is built to make justice and law point in opposite directions, and it refuses to say which should win. Its title asks whether there is a time to kill; its plot answers yes; its law answers no; and its jury finds a way to say both.
Paragraph two, the case for the killing. Two men raped and beat a ten-year-old child and left her for dead. Her father believed, on the evidence of his own county's history, that a jury might not convict them. Whatever the law says, most readers do not experience his act as the same kind of thing as the crime it answered, and the novel takes care to make that reaction possible rather than shameful.
Paragraph three, the case against. He killed two men in custody before they had been tried, and wounded a deputy who had done nothing. He appointed himself judge on a prediction about a verdict that had not yet been returned. Every argument for what he did is an argument against having courts at all, and the novel gives that objection to characters who are not fools.
A Time to Kill: Characters, Themes and the Law of the Case
Paragraph four, the law's answer. Insanity was the only defence available, and on the facts it is a bad one, because a man who plans knows the nature of his act. The trial therefore forces a jury to answer a medical question it does not care about in order to reach a moral question it does.
Paragraph five, what the jury does. In the jury room the question actually put is whether, had it been their daughter, they would have done the same, and every one of them says yes. The acquittal is returned as not guilty by reason of insanity. That is nullification: the community deciding, under cover of a legal form, that this killing will not be punished.
Paragraph six, the conclusion. So justice in this novel is what a jury is prepared to do, and the law is the shape that decision has to be poured into. Grisham leaves the reader with the uncomfortable double result: a system that could not deliver the right answer honestly, and twelve people who found a dishonest route to it. Whether that is a triumph or a warning is the question the book is designed not to settle.
Quick revision
Characters: Carl Lee Hailey, deliberate rather than deranged; Jake Brigance, decent and ambitious; Rufus Buckley, prosecuting for a career; Lucien Wilbanks, disbarred and useful; Harry Rex Vonner, loyal; Tonya, almost absent.
Themes: race; revenge against justice; the law as a machine to be steered; whose case it is; the cost of doing right.
The law: capital murder; insanity under M'Naghten; the plea does not fit a planned killing; the verdict is nullification.
The four-trial comparison is the strongest thing to bring to an essay on this text.
Test yourself
1. Is Carl Lee Hailey presented as insane? No. He is presented as deliberate: he judged that a jury might not convict the two men, obtained a weapon, learned when they would be moved and waited. He is acquitted on the ground of insanity, which is a different matter from being insane.
2. Why does Grisham make Jake Brigance ambitious as well as decent? Because a lawyer with pure motives would make the book a fable. Showing that the case is also the making of his practice keeps him human, and makes what he endures from the Klan more impressive rather than less.
3. What is the significance of the civil rights organisation's offer? It raises the question whether Carl Lee is a client or a cause. Accepting money and outside lawyers would have taken the case away from the man it belonged to, and refusing that is part of what Jake does for him.
A Time to Kill: Characters, Themes and the Law of the Case
4. Define jury nullification and show that it happened here. It is a jury's refusal to convict although the law and the evidence, strictly applied, require conviction. It happened here because the jury's own question in the jury room was not whether Carl Lee suffered from a defect of reason but whether they would have done the same for their own daughters, and having answered yes they returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
5. How does this trial differ from the other three on your paper? In all four the rule applied and the result reached come apart. In Shylock's case, in Bardell against Pickwick and in Hetty Sorrel's trial the gap works against the person in the dock, and it is opened by a court. Here alone the gap works in the accused's favour, and it is opened by twelve ordinary people rather than by a judge.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.