The scene in A Time to Kill of Jake’s closing statement is one of the most prominent examples of empathy in the film. It is a prime moment of not only a character in the movie invoking empathy in other characters, but a character invoking the feeling of empathy in the viewer as well. For the most part, the empathy that Jake is able to invoke is real. However, the empathy he is invoking could also be viewed as guilt. Up until this point in the movie the jury had shown little empathy for Carl Lee and were planning on calling him guilty. Jake’s statement is able to pull guilt from them, since they were looking at the case through very racially biased eyes, and make them change their minds and feel empathy. The scene begins with Jake apologizing for not being an adequate lawyer for Carl Lee, this serves to make the jury think more about how the trial would have changed if the lawyer had been more efficient. He starts discussing the concept of truth and whether we search for it with our heads or our hearts. Through this he causes the emotion of guilt to start coming through because he implies that we let our racial bias get in the way of searching for the truth with our brains. Therefore we must listen with our hearts, and this is when he starts causing the jury to feel empathy. It causes the characters to look further within themselves to realize what they may have been doing, and this tactic was very effective in invoking guilt and empathy. Jake leads into his empathy-invoking story by saying “we are all equal in the eyes of the law. That’s not true. Because the eyes of the law are human eyes”(A Time to Kill 2:15:10-2:15:15). Of course, the viewer is aware that this town is extremely racist but the actual members of the jury follow many of the same racist values that cause their judgement to be clouded by bias. This allows the viewer to see the guilt start appearing throughout the courtroom. This is the moment where it really settles in. The main invocation of empathy occurs when Jake attempts to put the jury in the young girl’s shoes, or at least into the shoes of her parent. He describes her rape and attack in vivid detail, mentioning how she was used for target practice when they were done and was thrown over a bridge when they couldn’t successfully hang her. This was the point in the movie where tears began running down the faces of the audience members. He ends the emotional story with the line “now imagine she’s white” (A Time to Kill 2:20:20-2:20:22) in order to take the emotions he caused, guilt and empathy, and combine them to ultimately make his final point. This makes everyone in the courtroom look up in surprise because they finally realized what they had been doing the whole trial. They finally felt what it would be like to be the parent of the girl who was raped and beaten, and realized that they might have done the same thing as Carl Lee if it had been their kid.

Work Cited

A Time to Kill. Joel Schumacher. Warner Bros, 1996. Swank Motion Pictures. Web. 20 Sept 2017.