A Time to Kill — John Grisham Chapters 11 and 13

Imagine a Mumbai news channel running the same story for a week: a father, a crime against his child, and a verdict everyone already has an opinion on before any court sits. Now put that story in a small town in Mississippi in the 1980s, make the father Black and the attackers white, and give the defence to a young lawyer who still has office bills to pay. John Grisham's A Time to Kill asks what justice means when the law, the town and the lawyer's own interests all pull in different directions. Chapters 11 and 13 show the case leaving the courtroom and entering the newspapers and the Klan's meeting ground.

In two minutes

A Time to Kill (1989) follows Jake Brigance, a young white lawyer in Clanton, Mississippi, as he defends Carl Lee Hailey, a Black father who shot the two white men who raped his ten-year-old daughter; Chapter 11 shows Jake facing the press and the money worries of the case, and Chapter 13 shows the Ku Klux Klan deciding to turn the killing into a cause.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of English – I on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.