"A Time to Kill"
Our screening of “A Time to Kill,” with post-screening guests, criminal defense attorney, Benjamin Brafman, and John Jay College professor, Delores Jones-Brown, provided yet another fascinating discussion, this one centering on the moral dimensions of revenge.
Professor Jones-Brown pointed out that we should not fixate too much on the deep south aspects of the film. To her mind, this kind of circumstance–a black man faced with an unsympathetic jury– could easily have taken place in the north. Brafman pointed out that when he successfully represented one of the Italian defendants in the Bensonhurst case in the 1980s, he faced this exact same problem–a jury predisposed to convict a group of Italian teenagers who murdered a young black man who paid the ultimate price of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Brafman said that he felt that “A Time to Kill” was the best movie about the legal system that he has ever seen. He thought it was realistic, and compelling, and captured so many themes that a practitioner must confront whenever dealing with what appears to be an impossible case. But Brafman also said that the film’s closing argument–the defense lawyer’s summation– too blatantly implored and encouraged the jury to ignore the law and acquit the defendant because they knew, in their hearts, that what he did in killing the two men who had raped his young daughter was morally correct. And that faced with the same circumstance, they, too, might have done the same thing. Brafman said that this overt display of juror nullification is typically appealable. A lawyer can essentially ask the jury to ignore the law and vote their conscience, but he or she cannot do so as explicitly as the defense lawyer did in the film to such dramatic Hollywood effect.
So, is there a time to kill, or is murder murder no matter what the complexity of the circumstance that led to the ultimate killing?
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