A Time to Kill Essay Questions

How is Jake Brigance complicit in the same racist structures he hopes to topple in a successful defense of Carl Lee Hailey?

Jake Brigance lives in one of two houses in Ford County listed on the National Register of Historic Places. His house is an old Victorian on Adams Street, in the rich part of town, and represents the glorification of the antebellum South and nostalgia for a time when white supremacy was not only accepted, but compulsory and unquestioned. And while he ends up defending Carl Lee for only nine hundred dollars, he still puts pressure on Carl Lee to produce money he knows he doesn't have, and then furthermore makes Carl Lee feel bad for accepting free counsel from the NAACP and Bo Marsharfsky. While Jake may be right about Bo Marsharfsky potentially marking Carl Lee as guilty by association, Jake fails to recognize that he, too, is motivated to defend Carl Lee by his own professional ambitions. Jake admits to himself that plenty of lawyers would have taken Carl Lee's case for free, and it seems that he wants to have his cake and eat it too, which is to say, he wants to reap the non-financial benefits of defending Carl Lee while also demanding money that Carl Lee clearly doesn't have.

Explain the key differences between Lester Hailey's murder case and his brother, Carl Lee's.

Lester Hailey stabbed a man, and the killing is determined by the jury to have been "justifiable homicide," or self-defense. While Grisham withholds most of the details of Lester's case, he does emphasize that the man Lester killed was Black. Carl Lee's victims are both white men, and Jake knows that this will make it much harder to convince an all-white jury to acquit. Furthermore, Carl Lee's murder is clearly premeditated and calculated. While his brother kills a man with a knife, Carl Lee uses an illegally obtained, fully automatic weapon. While Lester's defense is justifiable homicide, Carl Lee's is insanity, which is even harder to believe given the evidence that he carefully planned the attack.

How do the ambitions and fears of professional consequences of several key characters drive the action of the novel?

Judge Noose is pressured by Buckley and other members of the Mississippi political machine to block efforts to move the trial venue. Noose manages to deflect all of Jake's pleas with weak legal excuses and the notion that Carl Lee could not find an impartial jury in any county in Mississippi given the widespread media coverage. The coverage becomes so widespread that Noose places a gag order on the case, but still refuses to move the trial, because he fears retaliation and possible voter manipulation in the next election. Noose is too afraid of losing his seat to do what he knows is right.

Judge Bullard acts in the same cowardly manner, always passing the buck to the grand jury or the higher courts, afraid of actually making a ruling because it could alienate a certain pocket of his voters. He doesn't want to upset Black voters by setting Cobb and Willard's bails too low, but he doesn't want to upset his white supremacist voters by setting their bails too high.

Jake Brigance, the protagonist and "hero" of the novel, is far from immune to the blight of ambition at the expense of stewardship and ethical behavior. Jake solicits Carl Lee's case back from Bo Marsharfsky using deceit and enlists Carl Lee's own brother to help manipulate him into rehiring Jake. In the thick cloud of ambition, all of these lawmen lose sight of what lies at the heart of the issue, which is the extreme suffering of a ten-year-old girl.

Contrast Jake's attraction to Carla with his attraction to Ellen Roark.

Jake not only sees Ellen as an attractive woman and a potential romantic partner, he sees her as his professional equal, and at times, his better. Describing Ellen's trial prep, Grisham writes, "Jake took great pride in his trial preparation, but it was humbling to learn from a third-year law student" (350). During the trial itself, Ellen describes Jake's performance as brilliant to Lucien and Harry Rex. The attraction between them is physical, yes, but it is multiplied by a mutual respect for each other's intellect and professional abilities. This attraction is a stark contrast to Jake's initial attraction to his wife, Carla. Grisham writes of Carla, "She was a Dean’s List scholar in liberal arts with no intention of ever doing more than teaching school for a few years. Her family had money, and her mother had never worked. This appealed to Jake—the family money and the absence of a career ambition. He wanted a wife who would stay home and stay beautiful and have babies and not try to wear the pants. It was love at first sight" (271). Where Jake's attraction to Carla is born from her gravitation to domestic life and lack of ambition, his attraction to Ellen is driven by her career ambition and extraordinary aptitude for the kind of work he also does. Ellen understands him in a way that Carla never will, because Jake and Ellen chase similar thrills through the legal profession.

Both of the expert witnesses, one for the state and one for the defense, are discredited by either Brigance or Buckley. What are the arguments presented against them, and what bearing do they have on their actual credibility?

Dr. W.T. Bass is a drunk, unethical doctor who makes money by prescribing his rich patients drugs that they don't actually need, but will openly use for recreation. However, this is not the angle from which Rufus Buckley chooses to attack his credibility. Instead, Rufus dredges up an old, redacted charge against the doctor. Bass was, as a young medical student, arrested for the statutory rape of a seventeen-year-old woman on the orders of her father, a judge. But the charges were later dropped and the case expunged because Bass married the woman and had a child with her. Upon Bass's graduation from medical school, the woman was killed in a train crash, along with their child, and this trauma drives Bass to drink. Of course, when Buckley cross-examines him on the stand, he fails to mention anything past the initial statutory rape charge. For the jury, associating Bass with rape of any kind naturally hurts his credibility in a case whose basis is basically that Carl Lee was justified in killing Cobb and Willard because they raped his daughter.

Jake discredits the state's expert witness on a far more technically sound basis. Of the nearly fifty insanity pleas that the state's doctor has weighed in on during his career, he has determined zero defendants to actually suffer from any form of psychosis. Among those patients he's deemed perfectly sane, a handful were acquitted anyway and ended up in treatment under this same doctor's care. Jake demonstrates the clear discrepancy that during the trial, the doctor claims these patients are perfectly sane, and then later, he ends up treating them for years for debilitating psychosis. Jake and Ellen's narrative to discredit the state's expert witness works with the jury, who cannot seem to reconcile the pattern of the doctor's testimonies.