A Time to Kill: the Novel and the Trial

In one line

In a small Mississippi town, a ten-year-old black girl is raped by two white men, her father shoots them dead in the courthouse before they can be tried, and a young white lawyer defends him on a plea of insanity in a town the case is tearing apart.

In the wording a student can write in an examination: A Time to Kill, published in 1989, is John Grisham's first novel, set in Clanton, Mississippi, in which Carl Lee Hailey kills the two men who raped his daughter Tonya and is tried for capital murder, and is defended by Jake Brigance on a plea of insanity and acquitted.

The author, and why the book is on this syllabus

John Grisham, born 1955, an American lawyer who practised criminal and personal injury law in Mississippi and served in the state legislature before writing. A Time to Kill, published in 1989, was his first novel and sold very slowly until his later books made it famous.

Why MU sets it. Because it is the only modern courtroom novel on the paper and the only American one, and because it puts a question the older texts raise more quietly: what a court should do when the community's sense of justice and the law's answer come apart. Shylock, Bardell and Hetty Sorrel are all tried in a past that a student can hold at arm's length; this trial is recognisably a modern one.

The story

The crime. Two white men abduct, rape and beat Tonya Hailey, a black girl of ten, in Ford County, Mississippi, and leave her for dead. They are arrested.

The killing. Her father, Carl Lee Hailey, does not wait for the trial. Believing that a Mississippi jury may not convict two white men for what was done to a black child, he takes a rifle into the courthouse and shoots both of them dead as they are being brought in, wounding a deputy in the process.

The charge. Capital murder. If convicted, Carl Lee faces the gas chamber, and the district attorney intends to ask for it.

The defence. Jake Brigance, a young white lawyer in the town, takes the case. There is no dispute that Carl Lee did the killing and no possibility of an acquittal on the facts, so the only defence available is insanity: that at the time of the shooting he was not responsible in law for what he did.

The pressures. The case divides the county. The Ku Klux Klan revives a local chapter, and there is violence and intimidation directed at Jake, his family, his house and those helping him. National attention arrives. A civil rights organisation offers money and its own lawyers, which raises the question of who the trial is really for. Jake applies for a change of venue, that is, a transfer of the trial to another county where a jury might be drawn from a different population, and the application fails.