This is the second installment in a series of articles exploring the storylines and themes of films in which the U.S. system of justice plays a central role. In this entry, lawyers Steven Moore and Hugh Moore discuss “To Kill a Mockingbird” and its reflection on the character of criminal defense attorneys. Spoilers for the film are included.
“What kind of a man are you?” Bob Ewell bellows as attorney Atticus Finch descends the stairs of the Maycomb, Alabama, courthouse in 1932. Ewell has learned that Finch will be defending the Black man accused of beating and raping his white daughter and is unable to contain his disbelief.
This early scene in the 1962 movie of author Harper Lee’s revered American novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” offers only a rumble from a distant gathering of dark clouds. The “thunderbolt,” as the late film critic Roger Ebert calls the courtroom trial in his 2001 review of “Mockingbird,” doesn’t drop until later.
But Ewell’s question echoes across the movie in scenes featuring Finch: What kind of a man is he?
To Finch’s young daughter, Scout, who narrates “Mockingbird” as an adult, he’s the embodiment of impeccable character. Seen through her eyes, he is, as many fathers are at one time, the man who hung the moon.
The American Film Institute agrees. In 2003, the organization named Finch the greatest movie hero of all time, perhaps because it believed the attorney’s strong moral fiber led him to a pursuit more valiant than the daredevil antics of Indiana Jones, John Rambo and James Bond.
Although Finch’s quest doesn’t take him on a hunt through a Nazi stronghold for the lost Ark of the Covenant, it does pit him against a profoundly malevolent foe – the deep-seated racism of the American South in the early 20th century.
This evil hides behind a facade of small-town geniality for most of the film. The fictional Maycomb is a place where front doors are never locked, children safely roam the streets at night and a client pays his debt to his attorney, even if he has to give him a sack of hickory nuts instead of cash.
It finally shows its face in a scene in which Finch refuses to let an armed mob break into the jail where the accused, Tom Robinson, awaits trial. As he faces the trigger-ready herd, he has no weapon to wield or armor to protect him, but he stands his ground and insists his client has a right to his day in court, regardless of the color of his skin and the nature of the accusation against him.
Finch’s courtroom defense of Robinson reinforces the nobility of his character. Facing a jury of 12 white men, he methodically deconstructs the state’s case and makes Robinson’s innocence seem as obvious as the smug smirk on Ewell’s face.
But Finch does more than plead with the men in the box to consider the facts. As he delivers his closing argument in a room filled with people who look like him, he dares to make clear that he does not think like them.
“She’s committed no crime,” Finch says of the alleged victim, Mayella Violet Ewell, who he claims initiated the encounter between her and Robinson. “She’s merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society – a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being.”
Having established Robinson as an individual who deserves every right the Constitution of the United States affords him, Finch places his hope in the American legal process as he brings his argument to a close.
“In this country, our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system. That’s no ideal to me; that’s a living, working reality!”
Finch’s willingness to stand up for what is just regardless of popular belief or his ability to win a case reflects what many legal practitioners believe, says Chattanooga criminal defense attorney Steven Moore.
But while Finch’s principled ethics might make him a prime example of a lawyer, Moore adds, it does not make him a hero.
“As old, old, old lawyers used to say, being an attorney is a calling, like being a preacher. Lawyers represent people no one else wants to represent. We’re just doing our job. We all do what Atticus did.”
This includes Moore, who’s represented defendants in more murder cases than he can count throughout his 40-year career.
While Moore has often been the proverbial best attorney his client’s money could buy, he’s also represented many appointed clients for a low fee, purely because he knows if a judge asks him to take a case, the defendant needs a seasoned lawyer who can mount a vigorous defense.
“If a judge calls me, there’s a reason, so I rarely say no.”
To illustrate why, Moore draws a comparison between these appeals for his services and the scene in “Mockingbird” which Judge John Taylor calls on Finch after dark to ask him to take Robinson’s case.
“He wants the accused to have adequate representation. It doesn’t matter how bad the case is, the accused is entitled to the best defense an attorney can provide.”
While Maycomb likely contains a dearth of lawyers willing to take Robinson’s case, Moore says he believes the judge approaches Finch because he trusts he’s a man of character who shuns racist ideals.
“The judge knew Atticus wouldn’t care that his client was a Black man accused of raping a white woman,” Moore notes. “That was the mentality of old lawyers.”
Knowing Robinson needs a strong advocate – and fully aware he’ll be unable to win – Finch readily takes the case.
Even though the jury delivers a guilty verdict, Ewell resurfaces later to spit in Finch’s face for having the audacity to defend Robinson – and for implicating him in the injuries his daughter suffered.
This, too, is familiar territory to Moore. Although no one has spit on him for defending an accused killer, people have made their disdain for him crystal clear.
The most dramatic example occurred at the conclusion of the 2019 trial of Reginald Woods, who was charged with killing his girlfriend, Katrina Holloway, during an argument in 2017.
Moore argued the shooting was accidental – and the jury agreed. Upon hearing the verdict, Holloway’s family unleashed a verbal torrent on Moore, he says, necessitating their removal from the courtroom.
“I was sorry they lost a loved one,” Moore recalls. “But I had a job to do, and I did it to the best of my ability.”
Like Finch, Moore has never responded to attacks levied against him for representing a criminal defendant, but he does offer a caveat to high school and college age students who say they want to become lawyers.
“I tell them, ‘People are going to say things about you and the media is going to write things about you. If that’s going to bother you, do pots and pans in divorce court. A person’s life or liberty should not be placed in your hands.’”
Despite the arrows fired in his direction and the defendants his representation has helped to acquit, Moore still declines to compare himself or any other attorney to the story bound Finch.
“We don’t want to be heroes,” he concludes. “We just want to serve the community.”
Released in theaters in 1962, “Mockingbird” won Academy Awards for Best Actor, Best Screenplay and Best Art Direction. Its standing has only improved over the years, and in 1995 the Library of Congress selected the movie for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”
At least one critic was unimpressed – Ebert, who in his review labeled Finch a portrait of the “brave white liberal” and criticized scenes in which the towering attorney (Peck was 6-foot-3) stood front and center as Black characters filled the backdrop.
Chattanooga attorney Hugh Moore wonders how else the filmmakers could have depicted the realities of Alabama in 1932.
“The film portrays the truth of that time,” he contends.
Forty years after the events of “Mockingbird,” Hugh Moore found himself on the same battleground as he worked as a trial attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
During his three-year stint with the branch in the early 1970s, he tried cases involving school desegregation and teacher discrimination, including one in which the Black principal of a Georgia high school had been demoted to bus coordinator of a desegregated school system, and another Georgia case in which a county established a private white school by selling all of the assets of its public school (including its buses) to the wife of the only local lawyer for $1.
Hugh Moore says he was on the right side of the fight, but unlike Finch, who materializes in “Mockingbird” with fully formed values, his beliefs developed gradually as he advanced from institutions that were segregated at the time, like McCallie School in Chattanooga and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, to Yale Law School in Connecticut.
“Yale was a different universe,” he says. “I was with people from all over the country, and a lot of desegregation activism was taking place. I began to think about those issues in a way I had never had to.”
As Hugh Moore contemplated his future, his fresh perspective led him to the U.S. Department of Justice.
When he shifted to private practice in 1976, he began taking appointed cases. Like Steven Moore, this placed him in chairs next to defendants accused of grievous crimes, including Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist and serial killer, Harold Wayne Nichols, who raped several women in East Ridge and killed one.
Also like Steven Moore, Hugh Moore says lawyers are obligated to use their skills to ensure people such as these are afforded the full measure of their constitutional rights.
“Everyone is entitled to legal representation in a criminal case. The justice system won’t work unless those who are viewed as the worst of society receive the same representation as those for whom we have more sympathy. Everyone counts or no one counts.”
But unlike Steven Moore, Hugh Moore says he believes Finch deserves to be enshrined as a hero for personifying the noble character of the practice of law.
Fortunately, he adds, there are real life heroes from whom lawyers can also draw inspiration.
“[U.S. Representative] John Lewis didn’t look like Finch. He was a small man who overcame a speech impediment by preaching to chickens in his backyard and went on to reshape the law. We also have Morris Dees, who founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Bryan Stevenson, a Black civil rights lawyer who represented a Black defendant on death row.”
Hugh Moore says these people (including Lewis, who was not a lawyer) can serve as a wake-up call for aspiring, as well as weathered, attorneys.
“Apart from handling a merger or divorce, all of which has to be done, and done well, they offer a picture of the ideal lawyer. If you feel caught up in routine, you can look to them for inspiration.”
Attorneys can also cast their gaze on Finch, who’s forever preserved on celluloid as the embodiment of impeccable character, a person of strong moral fiber and possibly the greatest movie hero of all time.
Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the scene in “Mockingbird” in which Finch gathers his papers and turns to leave the empty courthouse alone.
Only the courthouse is not empty, and Finch is not alone. As he walks toward the exit, the Black community members who had packed the balcony during the trial stand.
Scout and Jem are with them, and as they watch their father leave, Rev. Sykes looks down at Scout and urges her to rise, as well.
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up,” he says, using her real name. “Your father is passing.”
“They knew Atticus looked at them like he did anyone else,” Steven Moore says. “They understood the risk he had taken representing a Black man, but he did it anyway, and he did the best he could. What else can an attorney do?”