Analyse af filmen 'A Time to Kill'

All people knows that there has been a massive differential treatment against the black people though the years, a perfect example of that is “A time to kill” a movie from 1996 directed by Joel Schumacher. The film takes place in Canton, Mississippi. The movie focus on injustice, especially in the south and in 1885 when the story is told, where the black people were challenging with justice and equal rights. The message in this movie is the difficulties with seeing everybody the same. Especially seeing the blacks and the same way as the whites and the deep-seated racism and prejudice that still exist this day. The central plot revolves around a little African American girl who was brutally raped and attempted killed by two white men. All the citizens in the town knew that the two white men would get a minor sentence, which the little girl’s father Carl Lee thought was very unfair, so he killed, the two, men and was sent to court which started a minor war between the blacks and whites in the town. The iconic thing about this case is that Carl Lee got a white defense attorney, Jake Brigance. The defense attorney Jake Brigance shows that justice should be blind to race, and that every single human should be judged by their actions, not the color of their skin as Carl Lee inspired him to show to the jury when he said this, “When you see me, you do not see a man, you see a black man, You are one of them Jake, you see me with the same eyes as they see me… that’s why I hired you. What would it take for you to set me free”. That gave Jake Brigance the idea to tell everyone in the court to close their eyes and listen to a very described story about a little girl who was brutally raped and hurt by two men and killed. In the end of the story, he said “Now imagine that she is white”, this was an eyeopener for everyone in the court, because they could not imagine that happening to a white girl. That speech changed everyone’s mind about Carl Lee and his actions. The movie shows how the justice system can be biased against people that are character by the color of their skin and how hard it can be for them to get a fair trial. But it does not only show how the justice system can be biased against people, but it uses the legal case at its core to explore larger social and racial issues. The movie is called “A time to kill” because in that very moment when Carl Lee’s daugter was raped and almost killed, and he knew that the two men who raped his daughter would have been let off easy, because they were white, that’s when he knew it was “A time to kill”. That’s why Jake accepts to defense Carl Lee and cannot quit this case, not even when his house was burned down to the ground, because he knows that he would do the same for his own daughter.