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Unjust Decisions In To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee

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In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, one of the most significant themes is unjust decisions are made due to race and social class. For example, a group of men showed up in dusty cars at the Maycomb County jail, where Atticus was late at night. Outside the jail, “in ones and twos, men got out of the cars. Shadows became substance as lights revealed solid shapes moving toward the jail door” (Lee 80). One man asked “he's in there, Mr. Finch?” referring to Tom Robinson (Lee 80). The group of men wanted to lynch Tom Robinson because of the accusation of him raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. The court case had not yet happened so nobody had heard Tom’s side of the story and they automatically assumed he had committed the crime because …show more content…

When he was announcing the final verdict, “Judge Taylor was polling the jury: ‘guilty… guilty… guilty… guilty…” (Lee 112). Before the trial even happened, “Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed” meaning he knew he was not going to win (Lee 128). The jury was biased from the beginning because it was all white. The case wasn't fair because Tom never had a chance of winning because he was going up against a white man and a white man would always win against a black man. Finally, Atticus came home to break the news that “they shot [Tom]... he was running… They said he just broke into a blind raving charge at the fence and started climbing over” (Lee 125). Atticus also explained that “he wasn't Tom to them, he was an escaping prisoner” (Lee 125). Tom knew he should not have been convicted and sent to jail in the first place because he was innocent, so he most likely could not take it anymore and decided to try and leave. However, because of his skin color, the guards did not really make a big effort to stop him without hurting him like they most likely would for a white

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