Summary
Due to the fact that the jury is sequestered until the conclusion of the trial, they hold court on Saturday, which is unusual under normal circumstances. Saturday is the day that Dr. W. T. Bass offers his expertise on the insanity of Carl Lee Hailey. Ellen is conspicuously absent from the courtroom in the morning, but the trial must proceed without her. Dr. Bass is miraculously sober as he takes the stand. He's sharply dressed in a hand-woven suit and bowtie. Jake asks a series of questions establishing Dr. Bass's expertise in the field of psychiatry, about his board certification and training. Then, Jake asks about his sessions with Carl Lee. Dr. Bass suggests that Carl Lee is still haunted by the combat he saw in the Vietnam War, but the rape of his daughter, Tonya, caused him to make a complete break from reality. He says, "What I’m saying, Mr. Brigance, is that, mentally, he left us. He was in another world. He was suffering from delusions. He broke" (421).
Dr. Bass's testimony seems to be going over quite well until Buckley takes the stand for cross-examination. Buckley clearly has some old dirt on Dr. Bass that neither Jake nor Lucien knows about. Buckley reveals that while he was a medical student in Texas, Bass was charged with statutory rape. After Buckley eviscerates Bass on the witness stand with this past offense, Judge Noose calls a recess. Jake is devastated by this revelation. Lucien catches up with Jake during the recess and tells him what Bass told him after he left the courthouse, which is that when he was a law student, he got together with a seventeen-year-old girl who was the daughter of a judge. The judge found them together and had Bass arrested, but eventually dropped the charge when Bass and his daughter got married and had a child together. Just when Bass graduated from medical school, his wife and child were killed in a train accident, which led to his alcoholism. Jake isn't softened by the story; he still wants to kill Dr. Bass for ruining his insanity defense.
During the recess, Ozzie informs Jake that a neighboring police department found Ellen last night and rushed her to a hospital. She is stable, but badly hurt. He tells Jake that the Klan got to her, stripped her and beat her. Jake feels like throwing up. Later that day, as Jake is resting in the Wilbanks house, a deputy calls him with urgent news and they bring him to his home a short drive away from Lucien's. His house is completely on fire. Every room in the house is ablaze. The fire department tells him there's nothing they can do to stop it, it will just have to burn out and all the way down. Meanwhile, Lucien has a plan that may save them from the disastrous performance of Dr. Bass. He offers a bribe to Clyde Sisco, a member of the jury. The night Jake's house burns down, a representative of Clyde's calls Lucien and asks for $50,000.
Jake and Harry Rex go to the hospital to visit Ellen and meet her father there, Sheldon Roark. Sheldon fills them in on Ellen's status. The doctors say that she will likely be discharged in a few days. The head wounds are self-inflicted; apparently, expecting to be raped and whipped, Ellen banged her head against the pole repeatedly, in the hopes of knocking herself out. Sheldon joins Jake and Harry Rex in the cafeteria, and Jake invites Sheldon to the trial. He says he'll ask Judge Noose to grant Sheldon chamber privileges. Sheldon says he just might have to take him up on that offer. Both Sheldon and Harry Rex are not optimistic about acquittal, though. Sheldon believes that Jake did a great job, but is simply dealing with a nearly impossible circumstance for a defense lawyer.
Lucien writes Jake what he claims is a masterpiece of a closing argument, the best closing argument he's ever written. Jake, forlorn and feeling defeated, just wants to drink Coors and think about how he'll put his life back together after the trial is over. He's afraid that Carla will leave him after she learns that their house has burned down. He's nearing bankruptcy. And he's living with a heavy conscience, knowing that Bud Twitty and the National Guardsman have sacrificed their lives for him and his case. The Guardsman survives the assassination attempt, but the bullet has lodged in his spine, and he is permanently paralyzed. Even after talking to Carla on the phone for an hour, he cannot bring himself to tell her about their house. He's just hoping she doesn't read about it in a newspaper in North Carolina.
The next day, Buckley calls his expert witness, Dr. Rodeheaver, from the state's psychiatric hospital. Dr. Rodeheaver looks much more the part of a psychiatrist than Dr. Bass, and his credentials far surpass Dr. Bass's. He gives a thorough rundown of his sessions with Carl Lee and explains why he thinks Carl Lee was sound of mind the day he committed the murders. Dr. Rodeheaver finds it absurd that any man who admits to a carefully planned, premeditated murder could use the insanity defense. Even Jake finds himself agreeing with the doctor in his head.
But then it comes time for Jake to cross-examine Dr. Rodeheaver, and he tears the state's witness to shreds. Jake asks a series of questions that reveal that in forty-six testimonies for the state of Mississippi, he has never once testified that a defendant is, in fact, insane. Jake brings up a handful of cases where Dr. Rodeheaver was vastly outnumbered in his assessment of sanity by doctors who testified for the insanity of the defendant. Jake also brings up the fact that several of those defendants are currently under Dr. Rodeheaver's care and diagnosed with severe mental illnesses, directly contradicting Rodeheaver's own testimony. Rodeheaver leaves the stand highly miffed.
Then it comes time for closing arguments. Jake moves the jury with his speech about justice, daughters, and the remorseless child rapists that Carl Lee did them a favor by killing. He even makes one juror cry. Judge Noose excuses the jury to go deliberate and tells them that if they cannot come to a consensus, they will continue to be sequestered. By the end of the afternoon, they have "five guilties, five undecideds, one pass, and one not guilty" (458). Lucien has still not decided on whether he will go through with bribing Clyde Sisco, who is currently "undecided."
Lucien finally tells Jake about Clyde Sisco's offer. Jake flatly refuses. He asks Lucien to drop it, because that is one line that he simply doesn't want to cross. Lucien then tells Jake that he helped organize a huge protest around the courthouse to take place tomorrow. He called in his old NAACP clients around the state hoping for a huge turnout of Black citizens, and they've promised to deliver. Meanwhile, at the motel where the jury is sequestered, the Klan attacks the foreman of the jury and the only juror to have indicated that he's voting "not guilty." The Klansmen threaten to kill Acker's children and hurt his wife if Carl Lee is acquitted.
The next day, as promised, an enormous crowd mounts for a demonstration in favor of acquitting Carl Lee Hailey. By mid-afternoon, there are more than 15,000 demonstrators in Clanton, dwarfing the normal population of the entire town. Reverend Agee marches around the courthouse with his bullhorn, and the chant, "Free Carl Lee!" can be heard ringing out across Ford County. Buckley is furious and accuses Jake of orchestrating the demonstrations. Jake points out that he tried to avoid this carnival by moving the trial venue, but both Buckley and Noose fought him on it. Buckley tries to allow the jury to deliberate at the motel, but Jake challenges the motion, citing precedent. Buckley moves for a mistrial, and Judge Noose denies the motion.
The jury slowly becomes more evenly divided. Half the jury favors acquittal at this point, and the other half still stands firmly for a guilty verdict with a few undecided stragglers. The jury considers telling the judge they are deadlocked, but Acker convinces them to get some rest and give it another day. Acker passes a note to the bailiff and asks that the bailiff deliver the note to his wife. The note tells her to pack her bags and take the kids out of town, because things could get dangerous. At the Klan clubhouse, Tim Nunley, also known as Mickey Mouse, is beaten, whipped, tied to a post, and burned at the stake by other Klansmen. It appears that they figured out he was a police informant.
The following day, an even larger crowd assembles before the courthouse and spreads throughout the town of Clanton. The jury arrives by Greyhound bus, and several of them are in tears from stress. Some who lean toward a guilty verdict feel intimidated by the crowd. Others simply want to get it all over with. When they meet in the courthouse, one of the jurors takes charge and makes the argument that if they hang the jury, the case would be re-tried in a few weeks, and they would be putting another group of their neighbors and friends in the same position they are in now. She then asks them all to take a moment and imagine if the little girl who was raped was white, and the rapists were Black. She asks them to consider if that little girl were their daughter, would they kill the perpetrators?
While the jury deliberates, Jake, Lucien, and Harry Rex wait for a call from the courthouse in Jake's office. The call finally comes, and they walk over to the courthouse with their military escort. The jury enters the courtroom with tears in their eyes. Jake can barely stand from anxiety. They hand over their verdict, and it reads not guilty, by reason of insanity. A celebration erupts inside the courthouse and a delayed and much louder eruption happens outside in the streets. Carl Lee Hailey is a free man.
Jake celebrates with Harry Rex and Lucien. He's welcomed at the Hailey household like family. He visits the house of Mack Lloyd Crowell, the truck driver who fought for Carl Lee not to be indicted. Crowell lives with Wanda, the juror who convinced the rest of the jury to acquit Carl Lee. Jake thanks her. With reporters practically assailing him in the street, he agrees to a press conference in his office at 2 PM, but then tells Lucien and Harry Rex that afterward, he's headed straight out of town to see his wife and daughter.
Analysis
After all of the deliberation, the jury's decision hinges on swapping the racial identities of the rape victim, Tonya Hailey, and her attackers, Cobb and Willard. Wanda asks the other jurors to close their eyes and "to pretend that the little girl had blond hair and blue eyes, that the two rapists were black, that they tied her right foot to a tree and her left foot to a fence post, that they raped her repeatedly and cussed her because she was white" (485). To an all-white jury, this proposition further emphasizes Grisham's theme of walking in another person's shoes, but it also emphasizes the racial tensions he's writing about, and how racial differences in this region of the country can totally blind a person to the true significance of their circumstances. In other words, if in the end all it takes to convince the jurors who want to convict Carl Lee that he should be acquitted is asking them to imagine that his daughter is white, this reveals the depth of racial prejudice in this community. That the race of the victims and perpetrators play such a huge role in the trial serves as a critique of the community that he writes about; that the all-white jury could eventually come to a not-guilty verdict perhaps demonstrates a sense of hope for this community.
Grisham leaves several threads loose at the end of the novel, exposing a few seemingly major plotlines as, in the end, devices to heighten the tension of the novel. Take Ellen Roark, for example. Grisham introduces Ellen Roark in Chapter 26 of a 44-chapter book. She becomes a major character and a possible extramarital love interest for Jake. She contributes invaluably to the defense, writing briefs and conducting research that, for the way Grisham describes the timeline of the defense, Jake would never have had time to do on his own. We even meet her father, Sheldon Roark. But Ellen is completely removed from the narrative when she's picked up by the Klan, stripped, beaten, and tied to a post. She's taken to the hospital, and we never hear another word from her. Other loose ends include the murder of Mickey Mouse the informant, and Jake's decision to withhold from his wife that their house was burned down by the Klan. The way Ellen disappears inconsequentially from the narrative demonstrates that her existence as a character is largely motivated by the sexual tension she brings between herself and Jake, and the emotional suspense of wondering whether Jake will foresake his marriage vows and pursue a romance with Ellen.
The irony of Jake's attraction to Ellen, which the narrative emphasizes, is that he sees her not only as an attractive woman and a potential romantic partner, but also 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 the 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 work he does. Ellen understands him in a way that Carla never will, because Jake and Ellen chase similar thrills throughout the legal profession.
