An excerpt from John Grisham’s legal thriller A Time To Defend Looking At Child Porn
Young, brash, 59-year-old former attorney John Grisham stood before the court of public opinion, feeling the eyes of the jury of the world on him. The Telegraph stenographer took furious notes in the corner as he approached the bench. Grisham checked the buttons of his crisp lawyering shirt to see that they were as square as his shoulders—and his convictions. The expensive leather briefcase he’d bought just out of law school lay on the lawyer table, in case he needed to suddenly pick it up and run through any underground parking garages, for lawyer reasons.
Inside it was a copy of Gray Mountain, the latest in a long line of legal thrillers like The Firm and The Pelican Brief that Grisham had written, all as part of a distinguished career of defending the rights of the people to have something to kill time at airports. But now he was arguing the greatest case of his life: the right of older white men to avoid prison time for looking at child porn. He brashly cleared his throat.
“We have prisons now filled with guys my age. Sixty-year-old white men in prison who’ve never harmed anybody, would never touch a child,” Grisham began. “But they got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn.”
Grisham paused, letting the jury’s sympathy sink in. He was certain he could feel them nodding in agreement. After all, who among them hadn’t been surfing the Internet, pushing away at Internet buttons, then accidentally ended up on a child porn site? Who among them hadn’t been a 60-year-old white man who’d had too much to drink? Those buttons are confusing; those drunk, 60-year-old white men so easily confused. This was a clear case of entrapment.
Brashly, Grisham turned and picked up a legal brief labeled State Of Canada V. My Good Buddy From Law School. As an impressed silence filled the room, he began to read.
“His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labelled ‘sixteen year old wannabee hookers or something like that’. And it said ‘16-year-old girls’. So he went there. Downloaded some stuff—it was 16 year old girls who looked 30.
He shouldn’t ’a done it. It was stupid, but it wasn’t 10-year-old boys. He didn’t touch anything. And God, a week later there was a knock on the door: ‘FBI!’ and it was sting set up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch people—sex offenders—and he went to prison for three years.”
Tears brimming his eyes, Grisham let his words linger there, like a 60-year-old man who’d seen the words “16-Year-Old Wannabe Hookers Or Something Like That” on his Internet machine. The jury contemplated the shocking facts at hand. Those 16-year-old girls had looked like 30-year-old women, and yet Grisham’s good buddy had still gone to jail. He’d entered a plea of “shouldn’t’a done it,” filed a writ of habeus not-10-year-old-boys, and still he was in jail. Worse—Canadian jail.