Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, forget everything you've seen on
television and in the movies. There's not gonna be any last
minute
surprise witnesses. Nobody's gonna break down on the stand with
a tearful confession. You're gonna be presented with a simple fact:
Andrew Beckett was fired.
You'll hear two explanations for why he was fired: Ours and theirs.
It is up to you to sift through layer upon layer of truth until you
determine for yourselves which version sounds the most true.
There are certain points that I must prove to you.
Point number one: Andrew Beckett was...is... a brilliant lawyer,
a great lawyer.
Point number two: Andrew Beckett,afflicted with a debilitating disease
made the understandable, the personal, the legal choice to keep
the fact of his illness to himself.
Point number three: His employers discovered his illness. And,ladies and
gentlemen,the illness I'm referring to is AIDS.
Point number four: They panicked. And in their panic,they did what most
of us would like to do with AIDS which is just get it and everybody who
has it as far away from the rest of us as possible.
Now,the behavior of Andrew Beckett's employers may seem reasonable
to you. It does to me. After all,AIDS is a deadly,incurable disease. But
no matter how you come to judge Charles Wheeler and his partners in
ethical,moral and human terms,the fact of the matter is when they fired
Andrew Beckett because he had AIDS they broke the law.
From the movie of
“ Philadelphia”