Word: prosecutor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then came the lawyers' turn to examine the bunch of us. The prosecutor was up first and he was hopeless: he stammered, shifted his weight, smiled awkwardly and generally seemed to be a sincere man who, try as he might, could not feign sincerity. We took pity on him and gave him easygoing, helpful answers to his fairly predictable questions ("Do you all understand what 'presumption of innocence' means?" and so on). It was actually fortunate that we got our fill of "generic" courtroom questions from him because we would get no such things from the defense attorney...
...with Vaseline--the story is simple, yet stirring: rednecks rape a black girl; the girl's father, Carl Lee (Samuel L. Jackson), retaliates with murder; he goes on trial in a racially volatile atmosphere. Enter his idealistic young lawyer, Jake (Matthew McConaughey); his mentor, Lucien (Donald Sutherland); the ruthless prosecutor (Kevin Spacey); and a Klan member or two (e.g. Kiefer Sutherland)--the story's ready-made. Sandra Bullock weaves her way through the story as Jake's indispensable assistant...
...Jackson) is a decent man, and if ever a homicide was justifiable, the vengeance he wreaks on his child's tormentors is it. On the other hand, Hailey is black, the jury is entirely white, the venue is a small town deep in the Southern boondocks, and the prosecutor (Kevin Spacey at his snakiest) is of course politically ambitious, therefore legalistically relentless...
...sympathetic to the militias: "We weren't aware of the Vipers, and that's what's surprising to us. We thought we were on top of things." What the Vipers may be is part of the shifting fringe of the disparate militia movement. These groups, says Richard Romley, chief prosecutor for Phoenix and Maricopa County, "pop up and go away sometimes overnight. They come into being and disperse. They don't want to be big because they worry about the focus that will be placed on them." Indeed, the Arizona Republic reports the Vipers may have broken away from...
This part of the novel is a series of duels, the most conventional of which is between attorney White and a brassy, shrewd woman prosecutor who's sure she has the con man nailed for murder. White handles this courthouse skirmishing well enough but flounders when she tries to get a sense from her slippery client of what really happened. Although she is middle-aged, and maybe a bit lonely as well, White is too self-possessed to fall for this road-company Andy Griffith. Still, she does begin to think he may be innocent of murder. That impression grows...