Why is it a sin to kill a mockingbird?
Those with long memories from high school or who have recently read Harper Lee's 1960 novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," as part of "One Book, One Chicago," the city's reading initiative that's climaxing this week, can likely paraphrase the answer from Chapter 10:
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy," explains the character Maudie Atkinson. "They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
OK. But the vast majority of us will never have a clean shot at a mockingbird or any other benign creature. So why is this particular precept from the hunter's code of ethics so important that it's in the famous title? What is "killing a mockingbird" in plain old non-symbolic English?
Racism? Not exactly. The central event of the book is the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die on charges he raped a white woman. The racism of small-town Alabama during the Depression, where the novel is set, makes the miscarriage of justice all but inevitable.
But the underlying sin, the sin practiced by the prosecutor, Mr. Gilmer, and the mob of white men who aim to lynch Tom Robinson before trial, is abuse of power. Metaphorically, using a rifle to kill a mockingbird means using the advantage and position you have in a way that brings harm to those who don't deserve it.
The moral standard bearer of the novel, attorney Atticus Finch, one of the most admirable characters in all of fiction, fought this sin bravely: "He didn't look back. He didn't just look forward. He just had to do his job, and he knew he was right and you go ahead and do it."
Those are the words of Mayor Richard Daley, talking to a Tribune reporter earlier this year about "To Kill a Mockingbird," which he says is his favorite book.
It's surprising. Not that a public library committee should just happen to choose the book the mayor loves best to inaugurate this program, but that a lawyer who slew his share of mockingbirds when he was Cook County state's attorney and who has yet to be confused with Atticus Finch when it comes to taking difficult or unpopular stands on matters of criminal justice should embrace this stirring, cautionary tale.
One Book, One Chicago, One Striking Contrast.
Daley was the elected state's attorney for the trials or retrials of six of the 13 men in Illinois who have been exonerated and freed from Death Row since capital punishment was reinstated. Included in this list are the Ford Heights Four case (only two of the four were sentenced to die) and the Anthony Porter case, in which an innocent man was within two days of being executed. Others have since been convicted for the murders in both cases.
Ten capital convictions obtained from December 1980 until April 1989 when Daley was the county's top prosecutor were reversed based in whole or in part on findings of prosecutorial misconduct and sent back for new trials or resentencing hearings. And this doesn't count other instances of dubious conduct in capital cases under Daley, such as his assistants excluding African-Americans from juries and telling jurors at one trial that the star witness was a bystander when in fact he was an accomplice.
It also doesn't count Daley's office's notable, errant non-death prosecutions of Gary Dotson, Sandra Fabiano, Steven Linscott, and David and Cynthia Dowaliby, nor does it count the still-standing convictions his deputies obtained using confessions by police whom the city now admits routinely tortured suspects.
Daley was not literally Mr. Gilmer in these cases--he was an administrator, not a courtroom warrior--but neither was he Atticus Finch, courageously guarding against the abuse of prosecutorial power.
And what keeps the "Mockingbird" irony fresh is that neither Daley nor current State's Atty. . Dick Devine, whom Daley anointed for the job, has taken the initiative to investigate exactly how the system failed, what needs to be done to guard against it and how fairly to resolve cases that were badly infected by police torture.
Daley should look at the remaining mess, reread his favorite book and ask himself, WWAD?--What Would Atticus Do?