It’s an elected position, and when the office cops a plea to a particularly gruesome charge rather than taking it to trial, that can come back quick to bite them in the ass. The dirty secret of criminal prosecution is that the District Attorney may take politics into consideration. All from prosecuting the hell out of a grieving father who took the law into his own hands. His name, he believes, will go into every home across the state of Mississippi, playing into his desire to become a conservative, hard-nosed governor. A Time to Kill takes this to the extreme with District Attorney Rufus Buckley, who prosecutes Carl Lee Hailey for murder and seeks the death penalty to make a “tough on crime” stance in a highly publicized case. There’s a commonly held truth in the justice system that District Attorneys are worried about optics. TRUTH 1: DISTRICT ATTORNEYS ARE POLITICIANS Today we’re gonna dispense with the Hollywood bullshit and talk about what I see as the four most important truths that can be learned from A Time to Kill.
LOGICAL APPEAL IN A TIME TO KILL MOVIE MOVIE
It’s a good movie and a good book, even if it is sensationalized as all fuck, that touches on important truths in the justice system…even all dolled up with the Hollywood glamor. Newsflash, in the end Carl Lee doesn’t fry for what he’s done. And enter Kevin Spacey as Rufus Buckley, the district attorney with his eyes on advancing his political career, who presents an argument that sure the victims were child-raping racists mowed down by an angry father, but there is no place for vigilante justice and therefore Carl Lee should fucking fry in the chair for what he’s done.
LOGICAL APPEAL IN A TIME TO KILL MOVIE TRIAL
Because Carl Lee is black and the racist motherfuckers are white, and because this story is set in early 80’s Mississippi, Carl Lee is immediately placed on trial for capital murder.Įnter the white savior, Jake Lee Brigance, a down on his luck lawyer in Grisham’s fictional Ford County, who takes the case after Carl Lee decides that facing an all white Southern jury in the early 80’s with a lawyer from the NAACP may not be the best damn idea in the world.
When the pair are led by after their arraignment, he kills them, shooting a deputy in the process.
Fully aware that the two will face a likely maximum of ten years in prison, Carl Lee decides to lay an ambush for them and hides out in a back room of the courthouse. It’s the big screen adaptation of John Grisham’s 1988 novel of the same name, and follows the trial of Carl Lee Hailey, whose ten year old daughter is brutally beaten and raped by two white trash, sheet wearing, tobacco chawing, racist motherfuckers. Just really, really fucked up.Ī Time to Kill is a tale of racism, the American South, “good and true” lawyers, a father’s vengeance, and the question between legally wrong and morally right when it comes to the rape of innocent children. Well, nobody except his victims, I suppose.īut this is where we’re at for this Film Friday, examining the big screen adaptation of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, and talking about four unexpected truths regarding the justice system that a layman, or an idealistic lawyer who still thinks things are “fair,” can take away from it. In 1996, when Spacey was presented as the District Attorney in charge of the trial of Carl Lee Hailey, father of a minor who was brutally raped and vengeance embodied against the abusers of that child, nobody could predict that one day Spacey himself would be in the same place as the two rapists killed by Carl Lee. There’s a sort of fucked up irony in watching Kevin Spacey seek the death penalty for a man who killed the rapists of his ten year old daughter.
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