CRIME CRITICAL EVALUATION

Crime Critical Evaluation

Crime Critical Evaluation

A Time to kill was John Grisham's first novel, and by his own admission there is "a lot of autobiography" in it. This legal-procedural novel follows the trial of a black father, accused of murdering the two white youths who raped his ten-year-old daughter. The main protagonist is not the defendant, Carl Lee Hailey, but the young white "street lawyer" (Paul 1999 154-176), Jake Brigance, whom he employs to keep him from the gas chamber. The central issue of the book is the justification for murder (as the title suggests), and the construction of a defence around the insanity plea to "give the jury a way out" of conviction. However, the novel itself is about more than just rape, murder, and the inside of a courtroom. It covers a plethora of other issues, such as unethical practices inside the legal system, racial hatred, a "˜sliding scale' of acts that range from highly criminal though to merely unethical, and the everyday struggle of those agencies and individuals that are required to deal with them. In this essay I shall provide a critical evaluation of the fictional portrayal of some of these issues.

To most lay-people the testimony of expert witnesses is difficult to follow, at best and incomprehensible jargon, at worst. When Carl Lee pleads not guilty, it becomes necessary for the defence to find a psychiatric specialist who will say he was insane at the time of the killings, and for the prosecution to find one who says he was in his right mind (John 1989 xi). In A Time to Kill, Grisham shows how expert testimony is so often contradictory, and how it can be exploited by both sides in a courtroom. The expert testifies in front of a jury who may or may not understand the content of his evidence. They will look to his experience and reputation to lend credence to his opinion. During Carl Lee's trial both Jake and Buckley attempt to discredit the opinions of each other's expert witnesses. In other words, Grisham is showing how it becomes the expert who is on trial, and not his evidence.

That is, in order to be found not guilty by reason of insanity, either the defendant must have been unaware of what he was doing when he committed the crime, or unaware that what he was doing was wrong, due to a state of mental debilitation. Grisham began writing A Time to Kill in the autumn of 1984, at a time when the idea of insanity as a "˜get-out' clause was fresh in the public's mind (Naveri 2005 599-603). The American people had been in uproar after John Hinckley had attempted to assassinate President Regan, in 1982, and had been found not guilty, by reason of insanity. As a result many people believe that insanity was a widely used defence that it resulted in a large number of acquittals and shorter incarceration times.

It is not just lawyers who are portrayed as unfair or ...