Published Reading Response

How Does A Time To Kill by John Grisham Make You Think About Justice in the World?

By: Jessica Das 809

I grew up watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. It showed me that justice isn't always fair and that some people, when emotionally unstable, will take the law into their own hands and commit a crime. Now I learnt all that from watching a television show for almost five years.

The book A Time to Kill by John Grisham taught me the same exact lesson but in a different format, in a different time period. A Time to Kill takes place in the conservative and racist south in the 1970s, in Ford County, Mississippi, where 73 percent of the population is white and most of them are racist. A ten year old black girl gets viciously raped by two white men by the name of Willard and Billy Ray Cobb. While the two men were coming out of their indictment from court, Carl Lee, the father of the raped girl takes the law into his own hands and kills the two rapist in cold blood. Now he is in jail and waiting to get his indictment.

The book shows me that justice doesn't always mean fair. I’m only in the beginning of the book and I have already learnt that in the 1970s whites could get easier punishments and get acquitted easier for murder than blacks. For example in the book Jake, Cobs’ white attorney says to Cobb:

“I’m white, and this is a white county. With luck I could get an all-white jury, which naturally would be sympathetic. This isn't New York or California. Mans supposed to protect his family. Some whites would admire you but most would want to see you hang. It would be much harder to win an acquittal.”(Grisham 61).

    This textual evidence shows that in the 1970s that justice wasn't nondiscriminatory, it used to depend on skin color.

            Another way justice wasn’t fair was because people in the court such as jurors were bought off or intimidated by threats from people like the Ku Klux Klan, to think a certain way. For example in the book Harry Rex a well-known lawyer tells Jake, “That’s Bill Joe he can be bought off. We pay him, he will say anything you want him to say”. This was when Harry and Jake were looking through the list of possible jurors and seeing who would make good ones. The evidence proves that justice isn’t fair because some people would do anything for money and if your rich you usually you got your way when you fell into trouble.

    Now comparing justice back then and now I believe that justice is fair, depending where the location is fairness varies but at least today the government goes through a lot more for a person to have a fair trial. In the book, the one who is being charged with the crime, depending on how much power he or she may have could get a bias jury or a jury or judge to their liking. Today, the jury is randomly selected and has to meet requirements such as no connection to the case or the people. The jury is usually a mix of different races and genders from different backgrounds so the jury can’t be bias. The point I’m trying to prove is that comparing the two time period I’m glad to say that the justice system may not be equal and fair but the government at least tries to make the playing field leveled as possible the law will let it be.