Chapter 1 Summary

Before the reader meets Carl Lee Hailey and Jake Brigance, the rape scene is played out in horrific detail. Readers meet the little black girl whose rape will incite her father to cold-blooded murder and the white rapists who are just about to commit their final crime in this world. Two rednecks, Billy Ray Cobb and Pete Willard, perch on Billy Ray's tailgate, drinking and smoking pot. They take turns raping a ten-year-old black girl. Cobb, who has done time in prison, profits from a lucrative narcotics business. Willard, older and less intelligent, pretty much "works for" Cobb, paid mostly in dope. The two white men picked up the little girl on a gravel road, walking with a bag of groceries. She is on the ground in a clearing, naked and tied with nylon rope in spread-eagle fashion, bruised and bloodied. Willard slaps...