To Kill A Mockingbird

By David Langwallner

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up peoples gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That why it is a sin to kill a mocking bird.

Legal Reflections on Visiting the Deep South of America.

Harper Lee and Crime. Furious Hours Cap Casey (2019).

The recent book on Harper Lee and my extensive teaching of Law and Literature where To Kill A Mockingbird is such a totemic work has led to this revisiting of her contribution to civic and criminal justice.

Harper Lee is famous as the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and was fascinated by crime as indeed much of the Southern Gothic tradition of such diverse figures as Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy and above all else Flannery O’ Connor was. The dominant themes are race, class divisions, murder and insanity all inter linked.

A later Southern Gothic crime novel the crime scene which I visited is detailed in John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. (1994). Also I think the sense of murder and indeed voodoo is very much in evidence.

If you have been for an extended period as I have to Savannah Georgia. An utterly eerie place. Some of the oldest courtly buildings in America and some of the best bookshops including one where except for financial impediment I would have picked up a first edition with dust wrapper of The Great Gatsby are there.

These early colonial buildings including the mansion of the man put on trial for murder Jim Williams a successful antiques dealer. A wonderful tour of the mansion for man who knew and liked him well was most informative. Antique dealers or art dealers who I have represented historically are the most ambiguously loved and hated people. Like marmite. If one is judgmental one might say many of them are innately dishonest.

The book on its cover has stunning example of southern gothic sculpture a slightly fractured image of the Old Bailey statute in the sinister cemetary.

https://statuecom.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/afpo77779.jpg

The legendary Irish writer, surgeon and dissolute Oliver St John Gogarty was sued for libel in His famous book As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) for making a remark of antique dealers from the liberties in dublin that:

They were in fact more interested in new mistresses than old masters.

A typical callous Irish comment but in substance right in my experience.

Beckett when I met him who gave evidence in the case, obviously despised by the judge, was gloriously entertaining about the case when I met him.

Harpers Lees was also fascinated by Voodoo as a kind of illicit art as other cultures are by alchemy (The UK) or Magic. (Terry Pratchett).  Since advocacy at the very least is more art than science and closer to voodoo or alchemy so am I.

Thuswhen her childhood friend Truman Capote invited her to go to Kansas, more amid western than a southern state to interview the murder that shocked the state where a middle class family was gunned down by random strangers she indicated to Capote  

I am intrigued by murder I want to go

Thus murder defines her literary career thereafter as well as other things. Some would say such interests are unhealthy.  Some are not me.

She in fact before the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird assisted Capote in tabulating and detailing interview after interview with the many years later executed murderers. Capote and Lee were in many respects ying and yang. He was cold and a mite unpleasant certainly when under the influence she was tomboy gregarious and inclined to get people to talk.

The legendary novel To Kill a Mockingbird itself opens with a quote about lawyers from Charles Lamb:

“Lawyers were children once.”

And in fact the legendary central character middle class widower Atticus Finch, more a real person that a fictitious person now more likes Homer Simpson has the care and custody of his children and his precocious tomboy daughter Scottie.

It is quite clear as a good father he was in touch with his child like side. How much of Harper Lee is in Scottie is difficult to say but there must have been some. For the novel that Americans vote their most favorite there is not a great deal of secondary literature in terms of literary criticism but quite a lot of significance in terms of law and legal theory.

I lectured the book as part of Law and Literature for many years and like everything you get tired of it but a new book on her life Furious Hours by Cap Casey (2019) much garlanded has refreshed my interest or at least refocused it.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a kind of textbook for lawyers. A manual for ethical living and lawyering.

The essence of the book and film is the representation by the lawyer Atticus Finch of a person of color, called Tom Robinson, for the sexual assault of a white woman in the 1930’s in the Southern United States in Maycomb Alabama.  Although it is clear that the woman is lying, the man is convicted by an all white jury and is shot while allegedly attempting to escape from custody. The vigilante justice of the south thoroughly exposed.

Although many law and literature scholars have argued that Atticus Finch is of his time and shares some of the sensitivities and prejudices of his community, a point made crystal clear in Lees earlier book published just prior to her death Go Set A Watchman (2015) which follows Atticus later in life where it is quite clear that although he would defend any person of color falsely accused that did not mean as a self defined Jeffersonian Democrat that he would give such people civil rights unless they earned it.

So as much as he is sanitized as a progressive reading both books together it is clear that he was a product of his racist times. Albeit an enlightened one and as is clear in Mockingbird both he and his family suffer considerable abuse for his representation of Tom.

Everyone he maintains is entitled in effect to offer his services and representations to the innocent in particular and his mastery of his brief establishes in fact consent though conviction follows.

The children are fascinated by  the secluded autistic person Boo Radley which threads through the book and an arbitral settlement perhaps exonerates another innocent for de facto  murder when the family of the non victim come after Atticus and his family and Boo Radley kills him.

Sometimes, difficult for the layman to understand murder is excusable and justified as perhaps is the death penalty.

The fictional Atticus Finch has been canonized by the legal profession and legal literature and he can at least be regarded as a lawyer seeking to arrive at the just and appropriate outcome in the terms of Ronald Dworkin.  Thus, he could be a trial lawyer version of Dworkins principled judge Hercules or of Llewellyn’s Grand Style judge. Seeking the right answer as a matter of principle.

He is also a hero to the innocence project in the fundamental belief of the lawyers obligations come what may.

The legend is enhanced by the paragon of American civic decency Gregory Peck playing him.

The book was written against a backdrop of much racially targeted prosecutions and convictions such as the infamous Scottsboro trial again a racially charged lynching. False accusation of rape against 9 black youngsters.

In contrast, the decision of the jurors and the majority of people in Maycomb, Alabama, is the result of prejudice a crucial legal realist insight and the book also illustrates the prejudices of the legal realist theorist Jerome Frank.

In fact the book is a negative field day for legal realism and critical race theory and there is no doubt that in finding Tom guilty, the jurors make a decision that reflects their own prejudices rather than the balance of the evidence.

Such matters as cognitive bias and rushes to judgment have to be resisted at all costs and juries are often warned of same by judges or advocates.

So as Atticus says:

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

Or

People generally see what they look for and hear what they listen to.”

Though one should not empathies with a sociopath many of whom I have had the displeasure of serving.

Recently the new book on Lee shows there was an unpublished novel involving the successful acquittal of an individual who probably murdered a probable black serial killer called the Reverend Maxwell. The book was to be called The Reverend. The facts funding and narrative incoherence went against her though like Salinger we might await an estate driven judgment of publication.

It traces how question of race, murder, false accusation or true crime thread threw her career as in the above instances. It also shows in her Southern Gothic way her interest in the supernatural and her understanding of vigilante justice. The Reverend a serial killer de facto was ultimately murdered and his killer got off on the not guilty but insane defense. Southern Gothic par excellence. So insanity again.

So what does Harper Lee say about Criminal Justice in her limited but effective public interventions

1: That the role of the advocate as the just and principled man is one to be cherished and that even shining white knights come often with limited blemishes.

2. That biases of a racial or other hue condition our judgment in this day and age. That one should not rush to judgment.
3. That voodoo matters!!!
4. That human madness is all present.
5. And above all else it is sin to kill a mockingbird.