48 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamA Time to Kill
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Racism
There are many levels of Southern racism on display in A Time to Kill. At its worst, racism takes the form of the Ku Klux Klan’s murderous intentions. But even Jake, who is friends with Ozzie and many other black community members, casually uses the word “nigger.” Southern racism is old and persistent, at times a family tradition. Jake’s frequent requests for a change of venue for his case highlight the issue: He does not believe that Carl Lee can get a fair trial in a place where the jury is likely to be majority white. In theory, jurors deliver impartial verdicts based solely on the facts presented at trial. But skin color matters in the jury box in Clanton—and, as is also intimated, everywhere. When Jake receives an all-white jury, he worries that the case is already lost.
Despite the happy ending for Carl Lee and Jake, the novel does leave open one important note about race: When Wanda Womack asks her fellow white jurors whether they would want to kill the men who raped their own daughters, it is implied that they are all imagining, not Tonya, but white children. The idea of a white girl being raped is so intolerable that the jurors are swayed. The question remains whether they would have been swayed if Wanda had instead put the idea of a black child in their heads.
Justice
Carl Lee Hailey’s detractors see him as a thug and a vigilante, a Vietnam veteran and a savage who used his military training to murder Cobb and Willard rather than let them stand trial for their crimes. And yet Carl Lee, on trial for his own crime, must seek justice via the very legal system he skirted by shooting the rapists himself. At trial, Buckley makes much of that irony, pointing out that Carl Lee robbed Cobb and Willard of their right to stand trial. Jake tries to make the case that the shootings managed to achieve a kind of justice—for the rape victim and her family. Carl Lee is confident in that principle, that all he did was pursue justice for his daughter. This is why he is so frustrated at being held in jail, and at confronting the fact that he may receive the death penalty for his act.
Many characters point out that a stable society cannot have people taking up arms and exacting revenge on anyone who wrongs them; that is what we rely on law enforcement and the court system to do. But no one in the novel besides the most virulent of the racists claims not to empathize with Carl Lee’s desire for revenge. In the jury box, justice has to be determined subjectively, in the mind of each juror. The facts show that Carl Lee committed a crime. The jurors free him anyway because they believe that justice is better served by returning him to his family.
The Imperfect Legal System
Throughout the novel, the US legal system is described as fragile, intimidating, confusing, broken, unfair, and crazy. Carl Lee comes to see it as something that actively conspires against him to take him away from his family. The attorneys, no matter how idealistic or principled, try to exploit any loopholes they can to gain an advantage. Crooks like Bo Marsharfsky are able to abuse the system unapologetically to enrich themselves, making their names off of freeing people who are guilty. But the attorneys are only one part of the system; once they are through making their cases, it is “average, ordinary people” (197) who decide a defendant’s guilt or innocence, the novel emphasizes. A perfect legal system could only exist where executed by perfect people. Many flaws in the legal system, which the novel illuminates, stem from human error and weakness: greed, intimidation, violence, and corruption. Votes can be purchased. Jurors can be beaten. Witnesses can be threatened. Yet Lucien still believes the system is the best one possible, given that it relies on people to run it. And the fact that Carl Lee goes free in the end suggests that may be true.
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By John Grisham
