Who is on trial in to kill a mockingbird

Atticus was assigned to defend. Harper Lee uses Tom Robinson's 'crime' to bring tensions in the town to a head and the author uses the trial as a way of making the ideas behind such tensions explicit for the reader. The two people involved in the so-called crime, Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell , are at the very bottom of Maycomb society.

Tom is black and Mayella one of the poorest of the poor whites. However, neither of them fits into the stereotypes held by the people of Maycomb. Tom is honest, hardworking and dependable, as Mr Link Deas's shouted testimony and his demeanour in court …show more content… The trial itself provides Harper Lee with the opportunity to examine the attitudes of people like the Ewells and the presumably more respectable members of the jury.

Bob Ewell emerges as a drunken, bullying, child-abuser with little respect for the law and even less for truth and justice. But however low in the social order he is, Bob Ewell can still look down on black people. At the beginning of his testimony he complains about a 'nest' of them near him bringing down the property values of his shack by the town dump.

Tom's account of Mayella's actions suggests that he may have indulged in some form of incest with his daughter, but the taboo against relationships between white women and black men is so strong that even Bob Ewell is shocked and horrified by it. Tom's evidence at the trial shows that she had planned to make a pass at him for a long time. It took her nearly a year to save enough money to send all her brothers and sisters into town to get ice creams.

The Southern Quarterly Summer Lippincott Company, New York, NY: Warner, Tom Robinson, a black man in To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the main characters in this story that causes controversy because of his skin color. Robinson and his skin color? In my opinion yes, the book revolves all around his skin color and racism of the time. Tom Robinson is treated unfairly because he was black not because of what he supposedly did.

The controversial subject matter in this book is immense in numbers, but out of all them, racism stands out the most. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Harper Lee uses Tom Robinson's 'crime' to bring tensions in the town to a head and the author uses the trial as a way of making the ideas behind such tensions explicit for the reader.

The two people involved in the so-called crime, Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell, are at the very bottom of Maycomb society. Tom is black and Mayella one of the poorest of the poor whites. However, neither of them fits into the stereotypes held by the people of Maycomb. No one — not even a neighborhood of "lower-class" blacks — can devalue a piece of property that is basically an extension of the town dump.

And, the entire courtroom will soon realize that the danger actually lies in living close to the Ewells, not vice versa. Atticus gently shows the injustice of Tom's situation throughout the court proceedings. For instance, Atticus makes a point of noting that even though Mayella was badly beaten and claimed to have been brutally raped, no doctor was ever called to the scene.

When he asks Sheriff Tate why he didn't call a doctor, the answer is a simple "'It wasn't necessary, Mr. Something sho' happened, it was obvious. But Tom Robinson is a black man, so calling a doctor simply "wasn't necessary," another indicator of the deep-running prejudice that blacks in Maycomb live with every day. Scout as well as Judge Taylor is genuinely surprised when Mayella claims that Atticus is mocking her. He is only treating her respectfully. That Lee chooses the word "mock" here is important.

Mockingbirds repeat sounds they hear. They're like little echo machines. Atticus is only repeating the story as it really happened, but in this case, an echo is a very dangerous thing to Mayella. Lee describes Mayella as being like "a steady-eyed cat with a twitchy tail," which is ironic given that Tom is much like a mockingbird just trying to make her life easier and more enjoyable.

Cats hunt birds, and Lee's description is of a cat stalking prey. After Mayella's testimony, Scout suddenly understands that Mayella is "even lonelier than Boo Radley. During his closing argument, Atticus ties the questions of race and social station together. Making no judgement about Mayella, Atticus tells the jury that "'she has 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.

What did she do? She tempted a Negro. Had Tom Robinson been a woman accused of seducing a white man, the outcome of the trial would be no different. How then, is Dolphus Raymond allowed to live and procreate with black women?

He's white, he owns land, and he comes from a "fine old family. The prosecutor, Mr. Gilmer, questions Heck Tate, who recounts how, on the night of November 21, Bob Ewell urged him to go to the Ewell house and told him that his daughter Mayella had been raped.

When Tate got there, he found Mayella bruised and beaten, and she told him that Tom Robinson had raped her. Tate leaves the stand, and Bob Ewell is called. Bob Ewell and his children live behind the town garbage dump in a tin-roofed cabin with a yard full of trash. No one is sure how many children Ewell has, and the only orderly corner of the yard is planted with well-tended geraniums rumored to belong to Mayella.

An extremely rude little man, Ewell testifies that on the evening in question he was coming out of the woods with a load of kindling when he heard his daughter yelling. When he reached the house, he looked in the window and saw Tom Robinson raping her. Robinson fled, and Ewell went into the house, saw that his daughter was all right, and ran for the sheriff. Ewell why no doctor was called it was too expensive and there was no need , and then has the witness write his name.

The trial is the most gripping, and in some ways the most important, dramatic sequence in To Kill a Mockingbird ; the testimony and deliberations cover about five chapters with almost no digression. Additionally, the courtroom scene, with Atticus picking apart the Ewells as the whole town watches, is the most cinematic portion of the narrative, and it is the centerpiece of the film version of the novel.

In the trial conducted in the courtroom, Atticus loses.