Jake Brigance

A thirty-two-year-old attorney and a native of Karaway, Mississippi, Jake hired on with the declining Wilbanks law firm in Clanton, Mississippi, in 1978. He quickly made it into his own practice. Now Jake lives with his wife Carla and four-year-old daughter Hanna in a restored Victorian home that is on the National Register of Historic Places. He is a liberal who easily mixes with all social classes but prefers the "average man" to the stuffed shirts of politics and the law. Most of Jake's clients are blue-collar workers, predominantly black, generally unable to pay what he deserves to earn. As the book opens, Jake has successfully defended three murder suspects, including Lester Hailey, brother of the man whose case will soon become central to Jake's life.

Jake is admirably self-disciplined, organized and in control of his life at the outset. The reader soon learns that wife Carla is...