The movie “A Time to Kill” by Joel Schumacher is a masterpiece of moviemaking that evokes the feeling of empathy and justice towards African-American people. In the movie, Carl Lee Hailey, black father of his ten year old daughter Tonya, avenges the raping of her daughter, by killing two white men accused of the crime as they are walking into the courtroom. The lawyer of Carl Lee is Jake Brigance, a young, talented lawyer, is empathetic towards black people and Carl Lee as a person. While watching the movie, the viewer feels an overwhelming mix of emotions, with the most prominent emotion being empathy. The movie utilizes feelings of empathy in every possible way – by making one character invoke empathy in another character and by invoking empathy straight from the viewer.

The conversation between Carl Lee and Jake the night before final day of the trial is an exceptional paradigm of one character invoking empathy in another one. “It’s how you was raised. Nigger, negro, black, African-American, no matter how you see me, you see me different, you see me like that jury sees me, you are them” (TK). This excerpt from the movie by Carl Lee underlines the limitations of the society and tries to invoke the empathy towards black people in Jake. Carl Lee displays to his lawyer that no matter how hard he tries, he will always regard Carl as a black man and that is the reality that black people around the county lived in. In the conversation, Carl Lee asks for empathy from Jake by saying “Now if it was you on trial”, to make Jake feel what he feels and what he has to go through (TK). The empathy displayed in this part of the movie is real and not in any way apparent, as is the result: Jake delivers the exceptional closing speech and proves Carl Lee to be innocent.

One of the most memorable moments from the movie, when Carl Lee comes back to his home to see his daughter, invokes the empathy from even the most callous viewer. After getting the call to inform him about Tonya’s rape, Carl Lee comes back home and see his daughter sodomized, beaten and battered, falls on his knees and tells her “Come here, baby. Daddy’s here” (TK). This scene invokes the empathy, because it displays the pain that our family members have to overcome, when we are hurt, a feeling that is familiar to all of us. Moreover, the scene where Tonya apologizes to his father for dropping the groceries, arises the feeling of real empathy towards the black people and conditions they had to live in.

The final scene, where Jake Brigance delivers the closing argument, is a perfect example of one character invoking empathy in another character, and the scene, as a whole, invoking empathy in the viewer. In his closing argument, Jake makes every person sitting in the courtroom to close their eyes and follow his story, a story about a little girl. By telling the story as all of us were in there, when the crime occurred, he invokes empathy in the white jurors and all white people seating in the courtroom. “Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her?” (TK). These words invoke empathy not only in the people in the courtroom, but also make us, the people outside the story, the viewers, to feel empathy towards Carl Lee and his family, by displaying the whining eyes of the spectators, including mother of one of the young man accused of raping Tonya. Seeing the spectators whining eyes and hearing the story of terrible crime, makes all of us to feel empathetic towards Carl Lee and black people in general, for the harsh condition they had to live in and for injustice they had to overcome. Moreover, the empathy displayed in this episode is real and is the same empathy that played the huge role in historical cases like Brown and Row v. Wade.

A Time to Kill. Directed by Joel Schumacher.

Warner Bros. 1996.

Undoubtedly, A Time To Kill is an excellent movies. It perhaps was the best movies that I ever watched in last week. According to the movie, there are two character who successfully arose empathy in another character. The first one was the defendant, Carl Lee Hailey, who invoked the empathy in Jake and boosted Jake to think about the experience of him as a first-personal-view colored man. By doing so, Jake overturned the inferior position and won the case with flying color. Before the day of the final judgement, Carl Lee talked to Jake in a half complaining and half accusing manner. He said that the reason why he chose Jake as his attorney was because he was “one of the bad guys”, which meant that Jake shared the perspective with the jurors so that he was of bigger possibility to come up with a way to win the case. On the other hand, Carl also thought that Jake was different from the other white people, because he believed that Jake was the person who pursuits fairness and justice. However, his view as toppled, when Jake mentioned the different of outcomes of losing the case between him and Carl. In response to Jake’s statement, Carl said desperately that: “you are just one of them; you never shown up at our place and our children will never play together”. The desperate speaking of Carl made Jake resonate with the feeling of Carl. He started to truly empathize with him as a first-person-view colored man and apply that to the group of white people rather than just think about how to win the case and promote justice as a lawyer. Therefore, during the closing statement, he abandoned his original work, which might be full of mundane technical worlds, and went for a personal statement，making full use of appeal to pathos. In his closing statement, he vividly depicted how an innocent young girl got rape and torqued in the way from grocery to home by two hateful whited men and encourage to jurors to image that girl was a white people. By doing so, Jake accomplished to invoked empathy in the juror. Hence, it is not hard for us to tell that Jake was the second character who dig out other characters’ empathy.

Besides, the movie did a great job at invoking the viewer’s empathy too. By showing the misconduct of two white people, who robbed a black-man-owned stored, raped and attempted to murder an underage black girl on purpose, and party Klan, in which hateful people tried to maintain the permanent ruling position of white people by conduction violent and illegal crime, the movie managed to invoke the empathetic feeling of the viewers toward Jake and Carl Lee. Even me once considered Carl as innocent when I was watching the movie. Also, the action of Klan invoked the empathy in the masses to ward Carl, too. Therefore, it was a combination effect.

However, as a judicious viewer, I think the depiction of the Klan was just an apparent invocation of empathy. Apart from merely invoking empathy, it also arouses the anger of the injustice between the social status of colored men and white men and about the ways that the colored men were treated. This type of feeling of anger would combine with the empathic feeling to form the “the empathic feeling of injustice”. Holding this feeling, this movie successfully convince a large number of viewers that Carl Lee was innocent is a fair judgement.

Preference:

Nussbaum, Martha Craven. “Rational Emotions.” Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995. N. pag. Print.

Time to Kill (Motion Picture: 1996)–electronic Press Kit. 1996.

There are many scenes in the movie in which empathy was invoked in both the movie characters and the viewers themselves. Those involve:

At the beginning of the movie where vivid images of Tonya’s rape are displayed, the movie evokes empathy in the viewers towards the little girl. The movie also evokes a feeling of anger in the viewers against the two boys who were raping her. Hearing and seeing Tonya crying and screaming makes the viewers realize how badly she was being hurt and how those two boys were heartless to hurt her as much. This scene is one of the most important scenes in this movie because the viewers not only empathize with Tonya herself, but also with her dad who took justice in his own hands. This part of the movie makes the viewers think -like Carl lee thought- that killing the two rapists was the right thing to do. Some viewers like me felt that shooting those two “animals”- as Jake calls them- wasn’t a good enough punishment (maybe burning them would be) (TK). If the movie did not have the scene of Tonya’s rape, no one would have an idea of how much she was hurt. As a result, it would have been a little bit hard to empathize with her or her dad. This scene also plays an important role in making some viewers agree with the court’s decision – freeing carl lee.

Another scene that is closely related to the above one is the closing remark of Jake in the court. Jake makes the juror empathize with Tonya by telling them a “story of a little girl” (TK). He tells everyone in the jury to close their eyes and have a picture of a 10 years old being raped. He goes on explaining detail by detail how those two boys were mocking her as she hurt. This scene makes the viewers remember the first five minutes of the movie and it makes the jury create their own image of the rape in their minds. Jake however, ends by saying: “now imagine of the girl was white” (TK). This part of the movie was a little bit confusing because the jury was supposed to empathize with Tonya (who is black) and not with a little white girl. However, I think that this was Jake’s method to humanize Tonya. In the eyes of the jury, Tonya was only a black girl whose life probably didn’t mean as much a white girl’s life. As biased as the jury was (against black people), only imagining a white girl being raped was the only way to make them empathize enough with Tonya to acquit her dad. Empathy in this scene though real was evoked into the jury by Jake.

In the movie, a few days after Tonya was raped, Carl lee indirectly informs Jake that he was planning to kill those two rapists. By asking Jake: “You’ve got a little girl, what would you do?”  (TK); Carl lee evokes empathy in Jake. This part is very important in this movie because it makes Jake empathize with Carl lee every time he saw her own little girl Hannah. Jack empathized with Carl lee to the point of not reporting him to the sheriff though he knew Carl lee’s intentions of killing the rapists. Empathizing with Carl lee also made Jake agree to defend him in the court though Carl lee wasn’t paying him enough to. This scene also shows that Jake didn’t treat this case as any other normal case- it was personal and dear to him. It was personal to Jake in a sense that he would have also killed the rapists if the same thing had happened to his daughter Hannah.

Work cited:

 A time to kill. Dir by Joel Schumacher.

Warner Bros,1996

Undoubtedly, empathy has accompanied the plot that twists and turns since the tragedy of little Tonya being raped takes place. Invocation of empathy happens not only from one character to another, but also from movie to viewers, such as Carl’s words that he and Jake’s children will not play together, or, Jake’s self-recognition that it is impossible to win the case with all jurors white. However, empathy is most notable in Jake’s closing statement that completely turns the tide and firmly consolidates Carl’s favorable position, which leads to the final victory.

As most of characters and viewers had predicted, the process was not a plain sailing. Jake encounters a lot of problems that is totally out of his anticipation. Mr. Buckley’s trap that tricks Carl to speak out his motives, and Doctor’s dishonorable crime record that raises doubt for his reliability to be trusted has led to the unfavorable situation while people’s judgement has inclined in the advantage of the killed criminals. Meanwhile, the stress shouldered by Jake intensifies when his home is burned, when Roark is kidnapped, when his friend advises him to give up. The negative feelings were engendered in Jake, and also in viewer’s mind. As a viewer, I feel empathy for Jake, feel sympathy for Carl, feel unfairness about the injustice treatment they receive and feel anger for the prejudice. That is the invocation of emotions brought by the movie and is part of the great success this movie has achieved.

However, when we take various aspects into account, it’s not hard to find that there are many reasons for the victory, the biggest part of which is based on the closing argument. Firstly, to invoke people’s empathy, ethos is applied. As one of the white people, though wrongly described by Carl as one of the bad guys, Jake’s argument is more convincing since he is one among the community of white people. It is beyond doubt that if Jake is black, not only would they fail the trial, but also would this case make the prejudice of negros worse than ever. But Jake’s white skin has exactly protected himself from bias, and set a solid basis for him to spread justice, and to perform his play of empathy invocation. The invocation of empathy is beautifully applied and acted during the last stage, when Jake asks people to close their eyes and experience the tragedy Tonya went through in the silent courtroom. Jake’s successful skill lands on considerable details and accurate depiction of the raping process, without neglecting the life-killing scream of the girl, the force exerted by the rude criminal, and mindless or even proud expression shown on their faces. It is pretty wise for Jake to picture all of these in such details, which invokes people’s empathy for victim, anger for the perpetrator and afterwards reverse people’s view back to their community color, white, as Jake says, “What if she is white?” People are in tears, covered by the purity of emotions, cleared of prejudice, moved to make a choice out of inherent judgement of right and wrong, setting Carl free.

The pleasing ending should be traced back to empathy, along with other emotions like indignation, sympathy that serve as the products of empathy. The work of Jake has made all present understand Carl’s behavior, or how extreme mental situation this father has experienced. The real invocation paid off when people in the courtroom have shared the understanding for the father and realized the motives. And after all this, Mr. Hailey was finally acquitted, in the name of justice.

In his closing argument, instead of focusing on proving Carl Lee’s insane mental state, Jake raised the empathic distress among juries and successfully convinced them to acquit Carl Lee. ‘I want you to close your eyes and I want you to listen to yourselves.’ so did he said. With strong emotions of his own, he described the story of two white men raping the black girl and vividly depicted an image of blood, hopeless, desperate. ‘Now imagine she’s white’. At the end, He successfully invoked the empathic distress among juries. In his argument, he didn’t state any hard facts or other reasons but to ask the jury one question: what if it was a white girl, and what if it was their children who got raped.

From my point of view, in this case it is only apparent invocation of empathy. What Jake was trying to do is to avoid the bias of juries against the black people that stuck so deep in their mind. From some white people’s perspective at that time, Black people was different, as mentioned in the film, no matter how they called the black men, Negro, black, or black man, they regard them as different kind of beings, and most of the time inferior to them. Therefore they have some sort of detachment when it comes to understanding how the Black people feels and thinks. Some of the extreme, are so biased that they even comes to a point where they think all of black man are immoral beings, criminals and animals that don’t have feelings. So it’s hard and impossible to make them feel real empathy for black people, and this lead to a common fact in court at that time that when it comes to cases like murder of white men by black, most of people in jury would not even bother thinking of the reasoning behind before they assert the guilty of black men. It becomes a common sense that black men can’t be treated equally in court. So in his argument, Jake make the jury forget about their racial prejudice for a while and focused on how furious and injustice they would feel for a rape like this happened to a white girl, a girl of their own kind and even their own children. Only under this circumstance will they function their empathy feelings normally without bias. Once the injustice and angry feeling is aroused, they will start to reconsider their decisions in terms of reasoning and preference of justice.

Jake was very wise to realize that although the prejudice against black is so deeply rooted in some of the jury’s mind and it’s impossible to change it within a short time, especially when involving a murder of white men, it is still possible for those people to have sympathetic feelings as long as the bias is not playing the main role. And he is clever enough in using apparent invocation of empathy to successfully switch the jury’s attention from the murder case to the rape that lead to the murder in which Carl Lee became the victim.

“A Time to Kill”, Joel Schumacher, Warner Bros, 1996

From my perspective, one of the most important invocations in the film A Time to Kill happens in the meeting between Carl Lee and Jake the day before the final judgement. Some people might think that this plot is much less important than the later one where Jake uses a story of a young little girl to move the jury and successfully turns the case and set Carl Lee back to his family. However, I consider the meeting as the most crucial part of the whole story and should be the turning point of the whole story. In the meeting in jail, Carl Lee attempted, and successfully invoked the sympathetic emotion of lawyer Brigance, which made lawyer Brigance to change his way of thinking of this case and finally reversed the jury’s decision.

Mr. Brigance, did not realize his doing was actually wrong and would never be effective toward the jury until Carl Lee Hailey mentioned him: “America is in war, and you’re on the other side.”(TK) What Carl Lee wanted to express with this sentence is that, what Jake did on the court were all wrong. From the previous plot, it’s easily to find that Jake spent most of his time mentioning that Carl Lee killed two rapist instead of two innocent, taking the doctor to the court and tried to prove that Carl Lee is psychotic, trying to convince the jury in perspective on law.(TK) Fortunately, Carl Lee knew that blacks could never been treated equally by white people at that time, so he wanted to invoke Jake’s sympathy and to make him realize that he was not, and would never be, a part of Carl Lee’s community. During the whole meeting, Carl tried to draw a line with Jake and made him realize that they are different people. After Carl told him: “If you were on the jury, what would it take to convince you to set me free?”(TK) Jake finally realized that what could actually convince that jury would never be the power of law and evidence but the power of sympathy and pity. If he was one of the jury, the only way to make he think that Carl is unguilty is to make him to feel pity of Carl. The brief sentences Carl said to Mr. Brigance accurately point out Jake’s mistake and not only invoked his sympathy towards Carl Lee, but also changed his direction to invoke jury’s sympathy.

During the trail, Jake’s empathy towards Carl Lee Hailey was completely showed to the jury from the story told by Jake. In the miserable story, he described the story of a little girl being reaped and beat on her way to home. The detail of the story was so vivid and intense that everybody in the jury could imagine the unfortunate and desperate that the little girl suffered. After Jake finished his statement, many of the jury, as well as the general population in the courtroom, either cried with tear or filled with anger.(TK) Jake successfully spread his sympathy to the public, but this is because Carl invoked Jake’s sympathy inside him.

Although it took almost the whole film for Jake to understand that his weapon should be sympathy instead of law, lawyer Brigance successfully used sympathy to defeat his opponent and convinced the jury to set Carl Lee free. Nevertheless, no one should forget it was Carl Lee who invoked Jake’s empathy in the first place and saved his own life.

Work Cited

A Time to Kill (Motion Picture: 1996), Directed by Joel Schumacher, 1996.

In the movie A Time To Kill ,the defendent’s lawyer, Jake Brigance has to denfend for the poor father Carl Lee Hailey whose daughter was cruely raped and injured by two white adults,while Carl Lee killed those two cruel guys on his own hand. Surely Jack Brigance has used more than one strategy to compete with the prosecuter, but facing the overwhelming unfair treatment to the Black, Jake at last chose not to use his long-prepared statement draft but to try to make the jurors feel what Carl Lee felt by telling them a story.

Jake Brigance makes the jurors imagine a scenario in their haed. He walks them through the whole process which little Tonya has once been through. He specifically emphasized each movement during the process—that how those two animals tore her clothes off, how they tied her up and beat her again and again; how little Tonya screamed helplessly and how badly she’s been ruined at last. I can tell that this tragedy happened on a pure and innocent little girl walking happily on the way back home for dinner has made all of the jurors started to feel a little bit uncomfortable at this point,since some of the juror are frowned. Jake continues his story quite emotionally by emphasizing how those guys feel indifferent about ruining the girl, how they treat this sin as a “Practice target”.Mr. Brigance actually knows that it is impossible for him to fight for a Negro on such case in the south fairly with hard evidence and reasons, so what he is doing is shifting the anger to those two bastards instead of Carl Lee Hailey and make them empathize the poor father. In order to accomplish his goal Mr. Brignance changed the scenario abruptly in his last sentence which says ” Now imagine the girl is white”. All of a sudden the shocking faces appeared all over the court because all of a sudden every white indicidual feels included.

Carl Lee Hailey has been proved not quity at last. I think it is surely because of Jake’s scenario has arouse jurors’ empathy in little Tonya as well as in Carl Lee Hailey. Beside the overwhelming racial descrimination toward the Black at the time, I think why many people and jurors initially think that Carl Lee Hailey should be sentenced to death is that no other people except Carl Lee himself can understand why he did it,instead, those outsiders tend to judge Carl Lee’s action without considering his motive. People can’t generate empathy in Carl Lee because they are just like a reader of a story and such tragedy has never happened to themselves before. But the great lawyer Jake Brigance has successfully make people believe that they may never understand Carl Lee even though they try to put themselves in his shoes,but considering the pain and abuse that little Tonya has gone through may happen to every one of their own children,suddenly everyone feels like he or she is in this situation. It works amazingly well and every juror was moved and shocked after Jake’s statement.

As Jake’s teacher said before, this case is quite a special one. No matter Carl Lee Hailey was proved guity or not guity at last, it’ll have quite an impact on people’s view at the time. So I think though Jake Brignace’s scenario aimed to make jurors feel empathy for Carl Lee, it works even better to make all people presented in court,all people in the scociety feel empathy for the Black, and make them see the unjust treatment the Black have received now and then. Once people have known the fact, it becomes much easier for them to put themselves in Carl Lee Hailey’s shoes.

Works cited.

A Time To Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher

Warner Bros. Pictures,1966

In the movie A Time To Kill, the most obvious invocation of sympathy is at the closing speech of defendant lawyer, Jake Tyler Brigance. The passionate speech raised the empathy of the jurors and the viewer of the movie toward Carl Lee, the black man who killed two rapists who raped and beat up his ten-year-old daughter, Tanya. The speech changed all the jurors’ mind from consistent condemnation of Carl to the final acquittal therefore saves Carl’s life.

In the previous trial of Carl Lee, the shrink who was supposed to prove Carl was legally insane when committed murder was found to be a rapist, thus no one believed in his testimony. The D.A. also cunningly provoked Care Lee and made him admit that he was fully aware of the consequences when he committed the murder. After several days of trial, the juror was nearly coming to a conclusion that Carl was guilty as charged. There was almost no chance of winning the case for the defendant. On the day before the final summation, Jake went to meet with Carl Lee, and they talked about how there was no chance to win. Carl Lee reminded Jake that the reason why he chose Jake as his defense lawyer is that he is one of the white men, who is exactly the same as those people in the jury, and the only way to win the case was to think as the jurors do. The secret weapon that can save them both is to find way to convince Jake himself that Carl is not guilty and use that way to persuade the jury. Thus, Jake started the summation by letting all the jurors to close their eyes. Then he depicted a scene in which a young girl was brutally beaten up, raped and left to die. The story included every detail that happened on Tanya, which affected everyone in presence. Some of the jurors even cried when heard about how little Tanya was left to die soaking in the urine and semen of two rapist, and in her own blood. Jake concluded his statement by asking the jurors to imagine that the little girl was white.

To me, this invocation is a real one. Since Jake is the father of a little girl, he can feel the pain of Carl Lee. As his wife said, Jake would have done the same thing if some thugs raped his daughter. He cried a little when he was describing the story of Tanya, which indicates the fact that he was truly touched by the story instead of pretending it in order to win the case. Additionally, Jake asked the jurors to imagine that the little girl being raped was a white girl, in which way Jake thought as all the white jurors, making them more empathetic by pretending the victim was one of their own kinds. The real invocation of empathy finally paid off, the jury realized the motive for Carl Lee to kill those two rapists, and therefore acquitted him.

Schumacher, Joel, Director. A Time to Kill, Warner Bros. 1996

One of the most notable invokations of empathy in A Time to Kill is in the closing comments of Jake Brigance, who is the defense attorney in the movie. I will not argue that he is invoking solely empathy from the jury. There are definitely other emotions along with empathy. He sets out to invoke empathy and it is nearly a given that extreme empathy will result in other potential emotions such as sadness or anger. Mr. Brigance shows the great power of emotion appeal in that he ultimately changes the mind of every juror with one story.

Mr. Brigance has come to a point in the trial where success does not look near. There have been several mistakes that he did not anticipate, and that means his last chance is to get to the emotions of the jury. The scenarios surrounding the case are loaded with emotional appeal, so Mr. Brigance makes the decision that he will use this to his advantage in the closing comments. So, he sets on his away. His goal is have the jury empathize with the family of Tanya when she was raped. He has the jury close their eyes and he tells the entire story of Tanya Hailey being raped. He uses extreme detail in describing her blood, the force and other terrifying aspects of the raping. He makes sure to include each and every detail so that the jury can envision the event as if it is occurring right in front of them. After listing off the scary details, he ends his story by mentioning that the girl he describes is a white one. This brief statement of it being a white girl is what really defines the entire closing statement as being one that is directly aimed at invoking empathy(TK).

During his comments and in the moments after, the impacts can be seen. Many of the jury members and the general population in the courtroom are tearing up(TK). It can be seen that Mr. Brigance has done a great job in making these people feel as though they are experiencing the rape right then and there. Another role that this great sense of empathy plays is sadness and anger coming out from people. They become so sad in just imagining a young and innocent girl being raped. This makes them mad at the men who would choose to do this and thus they have a bit more empathy for the actions of Carl Lee Hailey. Jake Brigance accomplished this task beautifully.

Though it took the entire trial for him to realize the power of it, Mr. Brigance finally used the extreme aspect of the rape to his advantage. Of course everybody in the courtroom has been aware of the rape situation for the entire trial, but this was different. When Mr. Brigance goes into excruciating detail of a young girl being raped, it is impossible for any normal human beings to be majorly impacted. It was such horrific act for those men to rape her, that Brigance simply needed to make the jury aware of how extreme it really was.

Works cited

Schumacher,Joel. A Time to Kill . Warner Bros. 1996