Defending the Guilty: Lawyer Ethics in the Movies
2014; University of Missouri School of Law; Volume: 79; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-6604
Autores Tópico(s)Legal Education and Practice Innovations
ResumoTom Horn: think I killed that boy? Thomas Burke (Defense counsel): That question will never come up between us. Tom Horn: Why not? It's going to come up in court. Tom Horn (1) Introduction: Innocence snd Atticus Finch Perhaps the most common question that criminal lawyers are called upon to answer involves the moral dilemma, or the perceived moral dilemma, posed by the representation of a client whom counsel knows to be guilty. (2) Quite often, for counsel, knowledge of a client's guilt is itself a complicated matter because guilt is--at least for the lawyer--a legal issue and is established only when all elements of an offense for which the client has been charged have been established by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. (3) For many, Attorney Atticus Finch's (Gregory Peck) representation of an innocent African-American accused of rape by a Southern white woman in Depression-era Alabama by the town's most imposing citizen, in To Kill a Mockingbird, (4) represents the consummate portrayal of the lawyer's discharge of his ethical duty to his client. (5) Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) is falsely accused of rape by Mayella Violet Ewell (Collin Wilcox), the daughter of a lower-class, white bigot, Bob Ewell (James Anderson), who caught her at tempting to physically seduce Robinson, an African-American. (6) The Ewells, clearly influenced by the father's racial hatred, (7) address Mayella's unacceptable sexual appetite by testifying against Robinson at trial. Finch's cross-examination of both Mayella and her father demonstrates their probable lack of credibility to most viewers. (9) But Robinson makes a fatal mistake during the prosecuting attorney's (William Windom) cross, explaining that he did chores at Mayella's request because he felt right sorry for (10) His answer prompts the prosecutor's cynical, calculated follow-up question, You felt sorry for her, a white woman? (11) Robinson's honest, but unfortunate, admission turns the jury from a possible acquittal to a likely conviction, when Mayella challenges the all-white jury to stand up for the claimed virtue of a white complainant: I got somethin' to say. And then I ain't gonna say no more. He took advantage of me. An' if you tine, fancy gentlemen ain't gonna do nothin' about it, then you're just a bunch of lousy, yella, stinkin' cowards, the--the whole bunch of ya, and your fancy airs don't come to nothin'. Your Ma'am 'in' and your Miss Mayellarin'--it don't come to nothin', Mr. Finch, not ... no. (12) The film's plot parallels in significant ways the actual prosecution of black defendants in the celebrated Scottsboro Boys case, (13) Powell v. Alabama, (14) and, later, Norris v. Alabama, (15) where an all-white jury convicted young black males of raping two white women. (16) In Powell, the Supreme Court reversed the convictions of the defendants in one of three groups of the accused tried together, based on the failure to afford them counsel to assist them at their preliminary hearings. (17) In Norris, the Court granted relief for other defendants based on evidence of deliberate exclusion of African-Americans from grand and petit jury service, respectively. These real life court successes resonate with the message of Atticus Finch's closing argument. Indeed, his closing argument in the film is an inspiring call for justice and an end to discrimination: I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the State. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She's committed no crime--she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. …
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