Sycamore Row - John Grisham

original. He planned it all. After he finished writing, he drove to Clanton, to the main
post office, and mailed the letter to me, along with the will. He wanted me to receive
the letter on Monday because his funeral was on Tuesday, at 4:00 pm., at the Irish Road
Christian Church. Details, folks. Seth took care of the details. He knew exactly what he
was doing. He planned it all.
“Now, as I said, it’s not your job to give away Seth’s money, or to decide who should
get what or how much. However, it is your job to determine if Seth knew what he was
doing. The legal term is ‘testamentary capacity.’ To make a valid will, one that is
handwritten on the back of a grocery bag or one typed by five secretaries in a big law
office and signed before a notary public, one has to have testamentary capacity. It’s a
legal term that’s easy to understand. It means you have to know what you’re doing,
and, ladies and gentlemen, Seth Hubbard knew exactly what he was doing. He wasn’t
crazy. He wasn’t delusional. He wasn’t under the influence of painkillers or other meds.
He was as mentally sound and sane as the twelve of you are right now.
“It might be argued that a man planning his own suicide cannot be of sound mind.
You gotta be crazy to kill yourself, right? Not always. Not necessarily. As jurors you are
expected to rely on your own experiences in life. Perhaps you’ve known someone, a
close friend or even a family member, who came to the end of the road and chose his or
her own final exit. Were they out of their minds? Perhaps, but probably not. Seth
certainly was not. He knew exactly what he was doing. He’d battled lung cancer for a
year, with several rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, all unsuccessful, and the
tumors had finally metastasized to his ribs and spine. He was in terrible pain. At his last
visit to his doctor he was given less than a month to live. When you read what he wrote
the day before he died, you’ll be convinced that Seth Hubbard was in complete control
of his life.”
As a prop, Jake was holding a legal pad but he wasn’t using it. He didn’t need it. He
walked back and forth before the jurors, making eye contact with every one of them,
speaking slowly and clearly as if they were sitting in his den and chatting about their
favorite movies. But every word was written somewhere. Every sentence had been
rehearsed. Every pause was calculated. The timing, cadence, rhythm—all memorized to
near perfection.
Even the busiest of trial lawyers spend only a fraction of their time in front of juries.
These moments were rare, and Jake relished them. He was an actor on a stage, in the
midst of a monologue he created, speaking words of wisdom to his chosen audience. His
pulse was spiking; his stomach was flipping; his knees were weak. But those internal
battles were all under control and Jake calmly lectured his new friends.
Five minutes in, and he had not missed a word. Five minutes to go, with the roughest
part just ahead.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, there is an unpleasant part of this story, and that’s why
we’re all here. Seth Hubbard was survived by a son and a daughter and four
grandchildren. In his will, he left them nothing. In language that is plain and clear, but
also painful to read, Seth specifically excluded his family from inheriting under his will.
The obvious question is, Why? It is our natural tendency to ask, ‘Why would a man do