7 of the best...
FIGHTS FOR JUSTICE ON FILM
1TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962)
OSCAR-WINNING performance by Gregory Peck as lawyer Atticus Finch defending black man Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) wrongly accused of rape. He said of the role: “I put everything I had into it – all my feelings and everything I’d learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children, and my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.”
2JUST CAUSE (1995)
SEAN CONNERY stars as a Harvard law professor who returns to the courtroom after 25 years to defend a young black man facing the death penalty for the murder of a child. Lawrence Fishburne plays the sheriff and Blair Underwood the man facing the electric chair. Scarlett Johannsen also appears in the crime drama playing Connery’s on-screen daughter.
3A TIME TO KILL (1996)
TENSE and controversial thriller with Matthew McConaughey as lawyer Jake Tyler Brigance who defends a black man (Samuel L Jackson) accused of killing the men who had raped his 10-yearold daughter. The movie was based on John Grisham's novel and real-life father and son Donald and Keifer Sutherland were among the cast, It was also Octavia Spencer's film debut.
4THE HURRICANE (1999)
TRUE life story about American boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter who was wrongly imprisoned for murder. Denzel Washington, who played the title role, said: “The film was touchy because people were murdered and a lot of people felt that Rubin did it, so you're opening old wounds. Malcolm X was more dangerous, but The Hurricane might have been more controversial.”
5THE GREEN MILE (1999)
BASED on the best-selling Stephen King novel, Michael Clarke Duncan plays the mysterious John Coffey who finds himself wrongly on death row for a double child murder. Tom Hanks (above with Duncan) is the guard torn between the innocence of his prisoner and his impending execution date.
6HART’S WAR (2002)
COLIN FARRELL plays law student Lt Thomas W Hart who finds himself in a POW camp in the Second World War tasked with defending a black prisoner (played by Terrence Howard) wrongly accused of murder. However, he is unaware that the court martial is a ruse to mask an escape from the camp and is intended to divert the attention of the Germans.
7MARSHALL (2017)
FILM about how crusading lawyer Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. Chadwick Boseman, of Black Panther fame, starred in the title role. Marshall says in the movie: “The Constitution was not written for us. We know that. But no matter what it takes, we're going to make it work for us. From now on, we claim it as our own.”