The Big Picture The legal thriller is one genre that will never go out of style. From Anatomy of a Murder to Anatomy of a Fall, legal thrillers can make the courtroom feel as exciting as the battlefield, and the popularity of true crime content means there's plenty of source material to draw from. David E. Kelley's latest legal thriller series, Presumed Innocent, stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a prosecutor accused of murdering one of his colleagues.
A Time to Kill RCrimeDramaThriller A young lawyer defends a black man accused of murdering two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter, sparking a rebirth of the KKK. According to Grisham, his 1989 novel A Time to Kill was based on a similarly gruesome case from 1984, in which two sisters – aged 12 and 16 – were beaten and raped by an intruder in their home. Grisham, who graduated from law school in 1981, had no clients at the time and decided to attend the trial himself.
One of Carl Lee's final conversations with Jake before the trial gets straight to the heart of the philosophical questions posed by A Time to Kill, and gives Jake exactly what he needs to win the case. Carl Lee tells Jake that no matter how much he means well and wants to help, he is just like the rest of the white people on the jury, unable to see him as simply a fellow man, but a Black man.