In the film “A Time to Kill”, defense attorney Jake Brigance attempts to invoke empathy from the jury during his closing statement to convey Carl Lee’s innocence. Brigance asks the jury to close their eyes and imagine the brutal rape and torture of a young girl; the horrible fate that befell the daughter of defendant Carl Lee, and thus drove him to murder the two aggressors. For the majority of Brigance’s statement, the attorney attempts to invoke a real sense of empathy from the jury through his description of this young hypothetical female victim, but is is only able to invoke an apparent empathy. That is, however, until the final sentence of his statement, with which Brigance is able to transform the apparent empathy of the jury into overpowering real empathy, all by uttering the phrase, “Now imagine she’s white”.

Brigance begins his statement to the jury by admitting to them that in his desperation, he must stray from a composed and prepared monologue one might expect from a defense attorney. Brigance tells the jury that they all have a duty “under God” to seek the truth “not with our eyes, and not with our mind or fear or hate (…) or prejudice, but with our hearts” (TK , 2:15:32 – 2:15:39). This statement plants the seeds for an appeal to empathy by appealing to emotion. Empathy is a invoked through an emotional understanding of another’s situation. Brigance opens his statement by conditioning the jury to make a decision not with their minds and rationality, but with their heart and the emotions it conveys to them.

Brigance asks the jury to “imagine” a little girl coming home and being brutally attacked on her way. Brigance spares no horrific detail of the altercation, asking the jury to imagine the girl being “dragged into a nearby field [her attackers] raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with vicious thrusts” unsuccessfully hanging, and then “pitching her [body] over the edge [of a bridge], (…) [and leaving] her raped, beaten, broken body” (TK 2:16:46 – 2:2:19:31). Through his telling of this violent narrative, Brigance attempts to elicit a visceral reaction of empathy for the victim, and disgust for the crime committed against her. In the middle of his story, he asks the jury if they “see” the little girl, essentially attempting to convert the jury into Aristotle’s Judicious Spectator figure; a witness to a situation who uses empathy in order to more keenly understand the mental and emotional state of the person involved in that situation. During Brigance’s tale, many of the women on the jury are visibly distraught and emotionally regretful for the poor girl. However, the fact of the matter is that at this time the women on the jury are shaken by the details of Brigance’s story due to their abrasive nature, and their hypothetical implications, not due to their actual pertinence in reality to Carl Lee’s daughter. This is due to a social disconnect between the white members of the jury and the black victim who they are meant to feel empathy for, but don’t due to this social inhibition. Essentially, while Brigance’s story has effectively roused the empathy of the jury, this is an apparent sense of empathy is without a target / subject for whom to feel for, due to the fact that the jury is incapable of empathizing with the real victim a black girl, and the defendant, her father.

However,  at the very end of his statement, Brigance is able to harness the jury’s apparent empathy and turn it into real empathy for the actual victim and defendant, all by uttering one phrase: “Now imagine she’s white” (TK , 2:20:21). In his delivery of this line, Brigance is able to break down the barrier between white and black, and enable the jury to feel real empathy for the real victim of the crime by invoking their sense of shame, and as a result, their sense of real empathy. Brigance relies on the tried and true tendency for the whites of the  to protect and empathize with only those of their own race. Furthermore, by asking the jury to imagine the victim not as a black, or even a hypothetical girl, but as a white one, he is able to invoke within the jury a sense of not only real empathy for the victim of the crime, but also a deep sense of shame at their upholding of the racial double standard which was the sole impediment to justice.