A Time to Kill — John Grisham Chapters 11 and 13

A father takes the law into his own hands after his ten-year-old daughter is brutally attacked, and the small-town lawyer who agrees to defend him has to persuade a jury that some acts, though technically criminal, deserve to be understood rather than simply punished. John Grisham's A Time to Kill puts that impossible defence at its centre, and the prescribed chapters sit at the point where the case's legal and racial pressures are at their sharpest.

In two minutes

A Time to Kill follows small-town Mississippi lawyer Jake Brigance as he defends Carl Lee Hailey, a Black father who killed the two men who raped his young daughter, and the prescribed chapters focus on the mounting legal, personal and racial pressures Brigance faces as he tries to build a defence in a community deeply divided along racial lines.

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