A Time for Mercy (Jake Brigance #3) - John Grisham Page 0,148

now? Where are all these wonderful people when you need them? All your friends at church. All your buddies in your little civic clubs. All those important people at the Coffee Shop who once thought you were the golden boy but don’t care for you now. They’re all fickle and uninformed and none of them realize what it takes to be a real lawyer, Jake. You’ve been here for twelve years and you’re broke because you worry about what these people might say. None of them matter.”

“So what matters?”

“Being fearless, unafraid to take unpopular cases, fighting like hell for the little people who have no one to protect them. When you get the reputation as a lawyer who’ll take on anybody and anything—the government, the corporations, the power structure—then you’ll be in demand. You have to reach a level of confidence, Jake, where you walk into a courtroom thoroughly unintimidated by any judge, any prosecutor, any big-firm defense lawyer, and completely oblivious to what people might say about you.”

Another mini-lecture he’d heard a hundred times.

“I don’t turn away too many clients, Lucien.”

“Oh really. You didn’t want the Gamble case, tried your best to get rid of it. I remember you whining when Noose dragged you into it. Everybody else in town ran and hid and you were pissed because you got stuck with it. This is exactly the kind of case I’m talking about, Jake. This is where a real lawyer steps up and says to hell with what people are whispering and walks into the courtroom proud to be defending a client no one else wanted. And there are cases like this all over the state.”

“Well, I can’t afford to volunteer for many of them.” Once again, Jake was struck by the reality that Lucien had the means to be a radical lawyer. No one else owned half of a bank.

Lucien drained his glass and said, “I need to go. It’s Wednesday and Sallie always roasted a hen on Wednesdays. I’ll miss that. I guess I’ll miss a lot of things.”

“I’m sorry, Lucien.”

Lucien stood and stretched his legs. “I’ll call the guy at Third Federal. Get your paperwork together.”

“Thanks, Lucien. You’ll never know what this means.”

“It means a lot more debt, Jake, but you’ll bounce back.”

“I will. I have no choice.”

37

In 1843, an unstable Scottish woodturner named Daniel M’Naghten believed that the British prime minister Robert Peel and his Tories were following and persecuting him. He saw Peel walking along a London street and shot him in the back of the head, killing him. He got the wrong man. His victim was Edward Drummond, Peel’s private secretary and longtime civil servant. At his trial for murder, both sides agreed that M’Naghten suffered from delusions and other mental problems. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. His case became famous and led to an insanity defense that was widely accepted in England, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and in most of the United States, including Mississippi.

The M’Naghten Rule states: To establish a defense on the ground of insanity it must be clearly proved, that, at the time of committing the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

For decades the M’Naghten Rule ignited fierce debates among legal scholars, and it was modified and rejected outright in some jurisdictions. But in 1990 it was still the standard in most of the states, including Mississippi.

Jake filed a M’Naghten notice and attached a thirty-page brief in support that he and Portia, and Lucien, worked on for two weeks. On July 3, Drew was again taken to the state mental hospital at Whitfield to be examined by its doctors, one of whom would be selected to testify against him at trial. The defense had little doubt that Lowell Dyer would find one if not more psychiatrists willing to say that Drew was not mentally ill, did not suffer from mental disease, and knew what he was doing when he pulled the trigger.

And the defense would not argue otherwise. So far, there was nothing in Drew’s profile to suggest he suffered from mental illness. Jake and Portia had obtained copies of his youth court abstracts, intake and discharge summaries, incarceration records, school reports, and evaluations from Dr. Christina Rooker in Tupelo