To Kill a Mockingbird and Defending the Condemned

Years before I worked with Death Row prisoners, I came to love Atticus Finch.

Marija Zaric via Unsplash

I am in debt to Harper Lee for many reasons - maybe even for my existence! My parents met as young lawyers working at the same firm and bonded over their love of books, including To Kill a Mockingbird.

I grew up with a chocolate lab named Scout and read Mockingbird for the first time when I was eleven or twelve (my Dad had wanted me to read it for years by then). Even now, reading the opening lines feels like returning home: “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.”¹

Reading Mockingbird felt like discovering a strange planet as a young girl who had barely left Northern New England. The American South felt as exotic to me as Kyoto or Cairo, and I was enchanted. I loved Mockingbird as much as my Dad promised I would, and I have revisited it many times.

Mockingbird is a rare work that offers new insights as its reader ages, and it offers as much to a tween as to an adult. I think the narrator, Scout Finch, is especially compelling. Like Agatha Christie², Harper Lee possessed some rare quality that allowed her to understand the mind of a child into adulthood. Scout Finch’s “voice” was instantly relatable to me when I was twelve, even though I was Scout’s opposite in terms of interests and personality. Now, as an adult, her voice feels remote but still somehow right, like the voice of my own child-self reaching back to me.

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To Kill a Mockingbird propounds an essential lesson: that real courage means defying our friends when morality demands it. The heroic Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout the following when he explains his decision to defend a black man accused of rape of a white woman: “This time we aren’t fighting the Yankees, we’re fighting our friends. But remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends and this is still our home.”³

Atticus remains a folk hero after so many decades because examples of such courage are rare, even in literature. And Atticus is remarkable for his capacity to love his neighbors even when they mock or deride him. When the odious Bob Ewell spits in his face, Atticus merely wipes his face with a handkerchief. When Ewell taunts him, Atticus gently responds that he is too old to fight. Atticus loves his town, and he trusts his neighbors. This trust may seem misplaced when Bob Ewell goes so far as to attack his children, but then a neighbor intervenes to save them.

My idealistic hopes of becoming Atticus Finch partly inspired my legal career, especially my decision to do pro bono work on behalf of the incarcerated. Assisting with legal defense for death row inmates was an odd choice for a twenty-six-year old sheltered young woman like I was, but my work on behalf of capital defendants was the highlight of my legal career. I don’t exactly miss that work now that I am a stay-at home Mom, but I do sometimes wish that I did more, or that I was doing more now to help the suffering.

Working on behalf of the condemned is a strange experience. Atticus Finch was not a bleeding heart and I don’t think I am, either. I am well aware of the evil in this world, and I do not want to abolish prisons, or life sentences, or to eliminate police departments. I think people who commit awful crimes must pay for them.

Like Atticus, though, I have learned that working on behalf of a person accused of a terrible crime will teach you awful lessons about humanity well beyond the person you defend, whether they are guilty or not. Atticus witnessed virulent racism and ignorance. As a young woman, I encountered prisoners who had lived the most wretched childhoods imaginable, plagued by unspeakable abuse. Some of what I learned - particularly about the prevalence of sexual abuse - was beyond description.

There are many people in this world who are so unloved and so abandoned by their families and by civilization. There are many people who take advantage of vulnerable children. Some of these lessons are harrowing. I watched Atticus learn them before I did, but that did not lessen my shock.

I wish I had gleaned policy lessons from my experience, but aside from an abiding animus against the death penalty⁴ I do not have any. Evil will always exist, and the small and vulnerable will suffer the most for it.

I do hope, though, that more of us - including me - try to recall Atticus’s most famous advice:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”⁵

1. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 1.

2. This is not as evident in her mystery novels, but it is clear from her Mary Westmacott works.

3. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 9.

4. I do sympathize with people who believe the death penalty is justified for some crimes. However, I believe it is impossible to implement fairly and that state executions are rife with Constitutional violations.

5. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 3.