A Time to Kill by John Grisham

Author:John Grisham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780307576132
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1989-10-24T18:30:00+00:00

Norman Reinfeld was a thirty-year-old genius in criminal law who held the record for finishing Harvard’s law school at the age of twenty-one, and after graduation declined a most generous offer to join his father and grandfather’s prestigious Wall Street law factory, opting instead to take a job with the NAACP and spend his time fighting furiously to keep Southern blacks off death row. He was very good at what he did although, through no fault of his own, he was not very successful at what he did. Most Southern blacks along with most Southern whites who faced the gas chamber deserved the gas chamber. But Reinfeld and his team of capital murder defense specialists won more than their share, and even in the ones they lost they usually managed to keep the convicts alive through a myriad of exhausting delays and appeals. Four of his former clients had either been gassed, electrocuted, or lethally injected, and that was four too many for Reinfeld. He had watched them all die, and with each execution he renewed his vow to break any law, violate any ethic, contempt any court, disrespect any judge, ignore any mandate, or do whatever it took to prevent a human from legally killing another human. He didn’t worry much about the illegal killings of humans, such as those killings so artfully and cruelly achieved by his clients. It wasn’t his business to think about those killings, so he didn’t. Instead he vented his righteous and sanctimonious anger and zeal at the legal killings. He seldom slept more than three hours a night. Sleep was difficult with thirty-one clients on death row. Plus seventeen clients awaiting trial. Plus eight egotistical attorneys to supervise. He was thirty and looked forty-five. He was old, abrasive, and ill-tempered. In the normal course of his business, he would have been much too busy to attend a gathering of local black ministers in Clanton, Mississippi. But this was not the normal case. This was Hailey. The vigilante. The father driven to revenge. The most famous criminal case in the country at the moment. This was Mississippi, where for years whites shot blacks for any reason or no reason and no one cared; where whites raped blacks and it was considered sport; where blacks were hanged for fighting back. And now a black father had killed two white men who raped his daughter, and faced the gas chamber for something that thirty years earlier would have gone unnoticed had he been white. This was the case, his case, and he would handle it personally.

On Monday he was introduced to the council by Reverend Agee, who opened the meeting with a lengthy and detailed review of the activities in Ford County. Reinfeld was brief. He and his team could not represent Mr. Hailey because he had not been hired by Mr. Hailey, so a meeting was imperative. Today, preferably. Tomorrow morning at the latest, because he had a flight out of Memphis at noon. He was needed in a murder trial somewhere in Georgia.

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