book report just mercy

Just Mercy Summary and Key Lessons

In “Just Mercy,” Bryan Stevenson invites us into his world of legal battles and moral challenges as he advocates for those crushed under the weight of a flawed justice system. 

This isn’t just a book; it’s a journey through the heart of America’s struggle with racial and economic injustice, a story of resilience and the quest for mercy.

Just Mercy Summary

At the core of Stevenson’s memoir is the harrowing case of Walter McMillian, a Black businessman wrongfully convicted for the murder of Ronda Morrison. 

The account of McMillian’s ordeal is a stark illustration of racial prejudice and legal malfeasance. 

Stevenson, a young lawyer at the time, is drawn into Walter’s world, discovering a web of lies, coerced testimonies, and suppressed evidence that paints a chilling picture of a justice system in dire need of reform.

The narrative weaves between Walter’s case and Stevenson’s broader reflections on the American justice system, painting a vivid picture of the various ways it disproportionately impacts people of color and the poor. 

From his early days as a law student, deeply moved by his first encounter with a death row inmate, to founding the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Alabama, Stevenson’s journey is more than a career – it’s a calling.

Stevenson’s relentless pursuit of justice sees him taking on the most challenging cases: from death row prisoners to juveniles sentenced to life without parole. 

His empathy for these marginalized individuals transcends legal advocacy, often leading to deep, personal connections. One such bond is with Walter, who, despite his eventual exoneration and release , suffers the long-term consequences of his unjust imprisonment, passing away in 2013 with Stevenson delivering a moving eulogy.

“Just Mercy” isn’t just a tale of one man or one case. 

It’s a mosaic of stories, featuring prisoners from diverse backgrounds, each echoing the broader themes of injustice and the need for compassion. These narratives are deftly interlaced with Stevenson’s reflections on larger societal issues like mental illness, poverty, and the challenges faced by incarcerated women.

A pivotal part of the book details Stevenson’s efforts with EJI to spearhead legal reforms. Their work leads to landmark Supreme Court rulings, including the unconstitutionality of sentencing children to life without parole and executing individuals with severe mental impairments.

Through these victories and heartbreaking losses, Stevenson’s belief in mercy as a crucial component of justice only strengthens. 

He shares candidly about moments of doubt and despair, particularly following the execution of a mentally disabled man. 

Yet, it’s through his own sense of brokenness that Stevenson finds a deeper connection to his calling, understanding that it’s often those who have suffered who can offer the most profound compassion and advocacy.

Also Read: Born a Crime Summary and Key Lessons

Key Lessons

1. the power of empathy and persistence in advocacy.

Empathy is a potent tool for change, particularly in systems resistant to reform. Bryan Stevenson’s journey in “Just Mercy” underscores the impact of approaching legal advocacy with a deep sense of empathy and understanding. 

He shows how putting oneself in another’s shoes, particularly those who are marginalized and voiceless, can drive a more compassionate and effective form of advocacy.

Application

This lesson can be applied in various fields beyond law . Whether you’re in education , healthcare, business , or social work, approaching your profession with empathy can lead to more meaningful connections and impactful results. 

This approach involves actively listening to others’ experiences, acknowledging their struggles, and advocating for their needs with persistence and dedication.

In the book, Stevenson tirelessly works to overturn Walter McMillian’s wrongful conviction. 

Despite facing numerous obstacles, his empathetic understanding of Walter’s plight and the broader context of racial injustice fuels his relentless pursuit for justice. 

This approach not only aids in Walter’s eventual release but also helps Stevenson in forming a deeper connection with him and other clients, enabling a more heartfelt and committed advocacy.

2. Recognizing and Challenging Systemic Injustice

“Just Mercy” highlights the importance of acknowledging and actively challenging systemic injustices, particularly those rooted in racial and economic biases. 

Stevenson’s work demonstrates how systemic issues often manifest in individual cases and how addressing these broader patterns is crucial for true reform.

This lesson is valuable for individuals in any sector that deals with systemic issues, such as education, healthcare, social services, or criminal justice. 

It involves developing an awareness of the larger systems at play, understanding how they affect individual lives, and striving to implement changes that address these underlying issues.

Throughout the book, Stevenson not only focuses on individual cases but also addresses the larger systemic problems, like the disproportionate incarceration of people of color and the poor. 

His establishment of the Equal Justice Initiative is a direct response to these systemic injustices, aiming to provide legal representation to those who are most vulnerable and to challenge unfair sentencing practices and conditions of confinement.

Also Read: The Simple Path To Wealth Summary and Key Lessons

3. The Importance of Resilience in the Face of Adversity

Stevenson’s journey in “Just Mercy” teaches the importance of resilience when facing challenging and often disheartening circumstances. 

The book shows that in the pursuit of justice and reform, setbacks and failures are inevitable, but perseverance and resilience can lead to significant breakthroughs and change.

This lesson is universally applicable, whether in personal endeavors, professional goals, or social activism. 

It involves maintaining focus on your objectives despite obstacles, learning from failures, and persisting in your efforts, driven by a deep-seated belief in your cause.

A poignant instance of this lesson is Stevenson’s handling of the setbacks in Walter McMillian’s case. 

Despite the frustration of legal hurdles and the initial failure to overturn Walter’s conviction, Stevenson doesn’t give up. His resilience is evident as he continues to investigate, uncover new evidence, and persist through the legal battles until he achieves justice for Walter. 

This resilience in the face of adversity is a central theme in the book and a key driver of Stevenson’s success in advocating for criminal justice reform.

Final Thoughts

“Just Mercy” is more than an autobiography or a legal drama; it’s a powerful testament to the capacity for change in even the most daunting circumstances. Stevenson’s story is one of hope, a reminder that within the complexities of the legal system, there’s always room for humanity and mercy.

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Summary and Study Guide

Part memoir , part exhortation for much-needed reform to the American criminal justice system, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is a heartrending and inspirational call to arms written by the activist lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based organization responsible for freeing or reducing the sentences of scores of wrongfully convicted individuals. Stevenson’s memoir weaves together personal stories from his years as a lawyer with strong statements against racial and legal injustice, drawing a clear through line from Antebellum slavery and its legacy to today’s still-prejudiced criminal justice system.

Between the 1970s and 2014, when Stevenson’s memoir was published, the U.S. prison population increased from 300,000 to 2,300,000 – the highest incarceration rate in the world. Of those incarcerated, 58 percent identify as Black or Hispanic. The War on Drugs and “Tough on Crime” policing policies disproportionately target juveniles, women, people of color, the poor, and individuals with mental health issues, all too often the victims of inflated sentences and wrongful convictions resulting in the death penalty. Stevenson animates these harrowing statistics with stories from his years as a criminal defense lawyer, personalizing the political through a powerful series of cases.

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The narrative backbone is the story of Walter McMillian , a young black man falsely accused of murdering a white woman in the small southern town where To Kill a Mockingbird is set. Chapters alternate between chronicling his trial, conviction, and the long road to justice and recounting the stories of other wrongfully persecuted individuals, including a 14-year old named Charlie who is sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing his mother’s abusive boyfriend. Taken as a whole, Just Mercy asks readers to consider the notion that the opposite of poverty is not wealth – it is justice.

By the start of the first chapter, “Mockingbird Players”, Stevenson is a member of the bar in both Georgia and Alabama, and has found himself defending McMillian for the murder of 18-year old Ronda Morrison. While there is no solid evidence pointing to McMillian as the murderer, false accusations, political machinations, and implicit bias against a black man known to be involved in an adulterous interracial relationship all add up to the accusation sticking.

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The chapters that focus on cases outside of McMillian’s demonstrate the staggering legal injustices delivered upon marginalized populations and expose the larger, systemic causes and institutionalized prejudice at work in their uneven treatment.

Chapter 2, “Stand” details several incidents of police brutality and racial profiling, including an encounter Stevenson himself had while listening to music in front of his apartment late one night.

Chapter 4, “Old Rugged Cross”, describes the story of Vietnam War veteran Herbert Richardson, whose case illuminates the struggles Veterans often have in obtaining the medical and mental health support they need, while Chapter 6 (“Surely Doomed”) depicts how widespread legal injustice is for juveniles, many of whom are tried and convicted as adults and receive much harsher sentences than they deserve.

Chapter 8 introduces readers to Tracy, Ian, and Antonio, who continue Stevenson’s exploration of incarcerated children, in these cases for non-homicidal offenses. Through their stories, Stevenson exposes the truth about how children of color are often incarcerated or worse for the same acts white children engage in with impunity. At fourteen, Antonio Nunez became the youngest person in U.S. history to be condemned to death for a crime in which no one was physically injured.

Chapter 10, “Mitigation,” turns its critical lens on the poor and mentally ill prison population, who –though corrections officers are not properly trained to handle mental health issues – make up more than half of those currently incarcerated. The case-in-point in this chapter is Avery Jenkins, who committed murder during a psychotic episode. Through Stevenson’s interventions, he is ultimately moved to a mental health facility better equipped to care for him, one step closer to a society that chooses to rehabilitate rather than incarcerate.

Chapter 12 touches upon impoverished women imprisoned for infant mortality beyond their control, and welfare reform designed to persecute poor, single mothers, and Chapter 14 focuses on physically, cognitively, and behaviorally disabled children who end up imprisoned. Chapter 16 ends on a hopeful note, as on May 17, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that sentences of life imprisonment without parole imposed on children convicted of non-homicidal crimes was cruel and unusual punishment.

The chapters that trace the unfolding of Walter McMillian’s case build a narrative arc between the late 1980s, when McMillian was accused, and his eventual release in 1993. According to Stevenson’s account, the case involves countless missteps, including sentencing McMillian to the death penalty before his trial officially began, moving the trial proceedings to a wealthier, and thereby whiter, community, where McMillian was less likely to be judged by a jury of his peers, and ignoring several eyewitness accounts that definitively gave the defendant an alibi. Police misconduct (including a paid testimony), perjury, witnesses flipping, and rejected appeals to the state circuit courts also created setbacks. After less than three hours of deliberation, and despite his obvious innocence, the jury found McMillian guilty of the murder of Ronda Morrison and sentenced him to death.

Late-breaking assistance from the television show 60 Minutes raised awareness of the dubiousness of McMillian’s case, and convinced the Monroe County district attorney to bring in the Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI). Ultimately, the court ruled in favor of McMillian, and after six years on death row, he was released and cleared of all charges. McMillian became a cause célèbre for criminal justice reform, resulting in the Equal Justice Initiative being selected for an International Human Rights Award.

Chapter 15, “Broken”, ends with an impassioned plea for a reevaluation of the ethics of capital punishment. By 1999, increasing media coverage of the high rate of wrongful convictions finally began to lessen reliance on the death penalty. In the closing chapter of Just Mercy , the lesson Stevenson impresses upon his readers is the urgent need to acknowledge the brokenness of society-wide indifference to the most vulnerable populations in America. Criminal justice reform must begin and end with mercy .

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Book Summary Just Mercy , by Bryan Stevenson

Over a half-century after the civil rights movement sought justice for African Americans, prominent movements such as Black Lives Matter continue fighting to expose and resist injustice. In this social landscape, Bryan Stevenson’s message is timely: The US justice system consistently denies justice to society’s most vulnerable members.

In his 2014 book, Just Mercy , Stevenson examines the justice system’s pervasive failures toward marginalized populations, especially Black Americans. To illustrate these failures, Stevenson discusses numerous criminal cases, most prominently the 1989 case of Walter McMillian, a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Alabama.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Stevenson’s analysis of the McMillian case and his evidence of extreme punishments doled out more broadly by the justice system. Moreover, we’ll consider Stevenson’s diagnosis of the root problems with the American conception of justice and his suggestions for repairing it. We’ll also examine arguments from other sources about how to improve the justice system and provide further context for the cases that Stevenson cites.

1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Just Mercy

Over a half-century after the civil rights movement sought justice for African Americans, prominent movements such as Black Lives Matter continue fighting to expose and resist injustice. In this social landscape, lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson’s message is timely: The US justice system, through mechanisms like mass incarceration and extreme punishment, denies justice to society’s most vulnerable members.

In his 2014 book Just Mercy , Stevenson examines the justice system’s pervasive failure toward marginalized populations—especially racial minorities, but also women, children, veterans, and the intellectually disabled and mentally ill. To illustrate this...

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Just Mercy Summary Stevenson’s Legal Background

To begin, we’ll discuss how Stevenson’s legal background showed him the unfairness of the justice system and the need for merciful treatment of the accused. First, we’ll outline his work with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC), then we’ll proceed to Stevenson’s nonprofit, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).

Working With Death Row Inmates

As a student at Harvard Law School in 1983, Stevenson completed a one-month internship with the SPDC—an organization representing death row inmates in Georgia. Stevenson writes that while working with the SPDC, he realized that even death row prisoners have the potential for redemption.

(Shortform note: Even if Stevenson is correct that death row inmates have the potential for redemption, death row conditions aren’t conducive to that redemption. In many states where the death penalty is legal, death row inmates are placed in indefinite solitary confinement and allotted fewer than four hours of out-of-cell recreation daily. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), [these conditions harm inmates’...

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Just Mercy Summary The Walter McMillian Case

Among Stevenson’s clients—first at the SPDC, then at the EJI—was Walter McMillian, a Black man from Monroeville, Alabama. In 1988, at age 46, McMillian was wrongly convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. McMillian’s case illustrates several of Just Mercy ’s underlying themes: the racial biases entrenched in the criminal justice system, the use of dubious evidence and tactics to win convictions, and the lasting harm suffered by those wrongfully imprisoned.

Background Information: The Crime, the Arrest, and the Trial

To begin, we’ll discuss the case itself, including the crime, McMillian’s arrest, and the trial. Because we’ll examine the case’s nuances in the following sections, we’ll start by introducing it in the broadest terms.

The crime that McMillian was convicted of occurred on November 1, 1986, when 18-year-old Ronda Morrison was shot and killed at the dry cleaning shop she worked at in Monroeville, Alabama . However, Stevenson relates that police exhausted their leads within weeks, and after seven months still hadn’t made any arrests. Consequently, the local public grew restless, publicly criticizing authorities for their failure to solve the...

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Just Mercy Summary Mass Incarceration and Excessive Punishment

Stevenson discusses McMillian’s case throughout Just Mercy . However, he also examines other cases of unjust punishment, revealing a common theme: The US justice system consistently doles out extreme punishments to the most vulnerable Americans . In this section, we’ll discuss four demographics that Stevenson finds susceptible to unjust punishments: children, the intellectually disabled and mentally ill, veterans, and women.

Extreme Punishments of Children

To begin, Stevenson argues that unjust punishments of children became the norm in the ‘90s. According to Stevenson, faulty predictions by criminologists led to excessive punishments of children , especially children of color.

Stevenson notes that in the late ‘80s, criminologists predicted that “super predators”—violent children without remorse—would inundate the juvenile justice system. He argues that widespread panic consequently gripped the justice system, leading to increased prosecution of children as adults and harsh punishments.

The Origins and Consequences of the Super Predator Theory In 1995, Princeton political scientist John Dilulio Jr. penned “[The Coming of the Super...

Just Mercy Summary Steps Toward Progress: Confronting Ignorance and Legal Hurdles

Despite the justice system’s failure toward society’s most vulnerable, Stevenson suggests that progress is possible, both in public understanding of justice and in the legal system’s conception of just punishment. In this section, we’ll first examine the four institutions that Stevenson argues have distorted our understanding of justice, then we’ll discuss more specific legal challenges that illustrate the possibility of progress.

Correcting our Understanding of Justice

According to Stevenson, four institutions have affected our view of justice, especially in relation to race: slavery, convict leasing, the Jim Crow era, and mass incarceration. He argues that these institutions have corrupted our understanding of justice , explaining society’s complacency with unjust punishments.

(Shortform note: It bears mentioning that, throughout Just Mercy , Stevenson implicitly likens the plight of enslaved Black people to that of imprisoned Black people today. Though he doesn’t go as far as other experts, who argue that mass incarceration amounts to modern-day slavery , he remains aware of the...

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Shortform Exercise: Propose Improvements to the US Justice System

Stevenson argues that the US justice system suffers from various flaws, leading it to consistently deliver unjust punishments. In this exercise, analyze possible flaws and propose improvements to them that would better the justice system.

Of the issues discussed by Stevenson (racial biases in the justice system; flawed legal processes; extreme punishments of children, intellectually disabled and mentally ill people, veterans, and women), which do you think is the most pressing? Why?

Table of Contents

BOOK REVIEW – Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Bryan stevenson, just mercy: a story of justice and redemption , new york, spiegel & grau, an imprint of random house, 2014, 336pp. paperback 2015, reviewed by alan w. clarke.

Your Honor … It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for   murder and send him to death row for something he didn’t do and much too     hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence. We have serious   prob­lems and important work that must be done …”

–Bryan Stevenson, in Walter McMillan’s case.1

It is no longer reasonably debatable that our inefficient, expensive, broken, racist, criminal justice bureaucracy wrongfully condemns and executes the wholly innocent.  That in itself marks an astonishing reordering of opinion since the 1980s when nearly 8 people in 10 supported the death penalty2 and a gubernatorial candidate in Alabama ran for office vowing to “fry them until their eyeballs pop out.”3 Riddled with race and class biases, the U.S. prison–industrial complex also ruins the lives of millions more—mostly poor, despised and discriminated–against minorities, generating the second highest imprisonment rate in the world, second only to the Seychelles4 and by far the largest total prison population of any nation on earth, roundly beating the far more populous China for this dubious distinction.5

Since 1973 courts have been forced, over vigorous and sometimes vicious opposition from prosecutors and police, to free 156 patently innocent victims of America’s experiment with capital punishment.6  While we can never know precisely how many innocent people have been killed by the state, scholars identify 13 who were executed despite probable innocence.  In the case of Carlos DeLuna, evidence that Texas killed—perhaps “judicially murdered” would be a better phrase—an innocent man approaches certainty.7 Beyond capital punishment, and in our name, the carceral complex deploys a variety of formally neutral, seemingly facilitative and supposedly disinterested, but in practice racist and classist, mechanisms to ensure quick, inexpensive, but fallible convictions with cruelly long imprisonment for those without money or resources.  Justitia may wear a blindfold but she unerringly detects race and class.

Enter into this Stygian morass a very bright, determined, idealistic, nearly broke, and at first splendidly naïve, Harvard trained lawyer, Bryan Stevenson.  Just Mercy shines the clearest spotlight yet on our Jim Crow-style judicial pipeline to prison or death. What did he do? His conversation with civil rights icon Rosa Parks summarizes his project nicely:

Ms. Parks turned to me sweetly and asked, ‘now, Bryan tell me who you are and what you’re doing.’ … ‘Yes, ma’am. Well, I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we’re trying to help people on death row. We’re trying to stop the death penalty actually. We’re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who’ve been wrongfully convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We’re trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don’t get the legal help they need. We’re trying to help children in adult jails and prisons. We’re trying to do something about poverty and the hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system. We’re trying to educate people to confront abuse of power by  police and prosecutors . . . .’ Ms. Parks leaned back, smiling. ‘Ooooh, honey, all that’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.’8

Walter McMillian’s wrongful conviction predicated on perjured testimony, and a law enforcement cover-up, arguably constitutes Bryan Stevenson’s most celebrated case. It exposed nearly everything wrong with our criminal injustice system—starting with a racist Alabama judge with the improbably appropriate name, Robert E. Lee Key, Jr.—a man who, unlike his namesake, never stopped fighting the civil war.  Key’s racism reeked from his first tele­phone conversation with Stevenson,  “This is Judge Key, and you don’t want to have anything to do with this McMillian case. No one really understands how depraved this situation truly is, including me, but I know it’s ugly. These men might even be Dixie Mafia.”9

And, what was McMillian’s sin? A married, successful black man, he outraged the white community by dating a white woman.

Mr. McMillian, … did not have a history of violence, but he was well known in town for something else. Mr. McMillian, … was dating a white woman. … And                one of his sons had married a white woman. Roots of suspicion.10

McMillian was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death in Monro­eville, Alabama, the natal county of favorite daughter Harper Lee.  Her 1960 classic To Kill a Mockingbird eerily foreshadows this case. The film version of Lee’s novel was shot in Monroeville and Gregory Peck, as defense lawyer Atticus Finch, argued his fictional case in the old county courthouse. Brock Peters played the part of Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly charged with and convicted of raping a white woman.  Adding to the irony, the community proudly stages a yearly production of the story with the Mockingbird Players. 11  The book, the film, the annually staged play, and a museum commemorat­ing the trial, are the town’s main tourist attractions  thus intertwining self-congratulatory civic vainglory with racism and dollops of rancid hypocrisy. 12

For Walter McMillian, as for the fictional Tom Robinson, Monroeville seethed with racism. “The intense rage of the arresting officers and the rac­ist taunts and threats from uniformed police officers who did not know him were shocking.”13 McMillian’s arresting officer unleashed such a torrent of invective that all Walter heard was “‘[n]igger this,’ ‘nigger that,’ followed by insults and threats of lynching.” 14

That law enforcement somehow housed him on death row even before he was tried, much less convicted, speaks volumes about the cozy relationship between police, prosecutor and judge. Stevenson and the reader are left per­plexed. How did they manage to put a presumptively innocent man onto death row before trial, verdict, sentence, or even the ordinary prison processes?15

One can only imagine McMillian’s horror at his precipitate and confused change in circumstances, one day innocent and free, and then in a bewilder­ing instant transformed into an innocent man on death row. Sinking into deep despair, 16

[h]is body reacted to the shock of the situation. A lifelong smoker, Walter      tried to smoke to calm his nerves, but at Holman [the prison housing Alabama’s death row] he found the experience of smoking nauseating and quit immediately. For days he couldn’t taste anything he ate. He couldn’t orient or calm himself. When he woke each morning, he would feel normal for a few minutes and then sink into terror upon remembering where he was. Prison officials had shaved his head and all the hair from his face. Looking into a mirror he didn’t recognize himself. 17

This is no ordinary case of the wrongful conviction of a black man on death row (the fact that such cases remain all too ordinary is a penetrating indictment of our criminal justice system). It was not even a typical case of wrongful conviction resisted at every level notwithstanding clear evidence of actual innocence, although this too occurs often enough as defensive pros­ecutors invent ever-nuttier hypotheses of guilt thus compounding their initial error.  Far worse than mere incompetence tinged with racism, this capital case exposed the downright framing of an innocent black man, using perjured testimony, for having the audacity to date a white woman.

It is also a tale of perseverance. One follows in awe as Stevenson overcomes one obstacle after another in his improbable untangling of the web of deceit thrown up by law enforcement officers, the prosecutor and judge. Indeed, this is the part that any death penalty post-conviction lawyer will appreciate.  Few lawyers harbor the talent, intellect and diligence to, with meager resources, untangle such a deceitful web as the one that ensnared Walter McMillian. This leads to a regrettable conclusion. He was lucky in two respects. First, he had one of the most effective and caring lawyers imaginable.  How many others languish in our prisons who, if they have a lawyer at all, have one who isn’t up to such a daunting task?. Second, he had the good fortune, if good fortune it can be called, to draw a foolish judge, who over-rode the jury’s recommendation and sentenced him to death, thus inviting more attention to his case. “If the jury’s sentence of life in prison without parole had been left in place, Mr. McMillian might have been another forgotten black inmate in an Alabama prison.” 18

While working on multiple death row cases, Bryan Stevenson somehow found time to tackle the even more widespread problem of children as young as thirteen or fourteen years old increasingly sentenced in adult courts to life without the possibility of parole. In 2010, as a result of Stevenson’s advocacy, the Supreme Court invalidated “Life imprisonment without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of non-homicide crimes” holding such to be “cruel and unusual punishment and constitutionally impermissible.”19  Then in 2012, also as a result of his efforts, the Supreme Court held that, even in cases of homicide, life without the possibility of parole is unconstitutional.20  These two cases likely had a broader impact in the numbers of people affected than any other case he had handled.

For most lawyers, these achievements alone would mark a successful career in social justice advocacy.  Stevenson, always pressed for time, nonetheless also turned his attention to wrongfully convicted “bad moms” whose children were stillborn, or suffered an unexplained death, or who were “criminally prosecuted and sent to prison for decades if there was any evidence that they had used drugs at any point during the pregnancy.” 21

In the process, he exposed an incompetent forensic pathologist “with a his­tory of prematurely and incorrectly declaring deaths to be homicides without adequate supporting evidence.” 22  His work also helped start a movement to assist the “thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly” countering the wrongful “criminalization … and the persecution of poor women  whose children die.” 23  In one case, the “discredited pathologist left Alabama but continues to serve as a practicing medical examiner in Texas.” 24

Stevenson has not only fought racism; he has experienced it. Late one night, exhausted from a hectic day, and while sitting for a few minutes in his car outside his apartment, listening to Sly and the Family Stone on the radio, a police SWAT team accosted him. Systematically humiliated and illegally searched before a growing crowd, he could hear people “talking about all the burglaries in the neighborhood. . . . There was a particularly vocal older white woman who loudly demanded that I be questioned about items she was missing.” 25

“’Ask him about my radio and my vacuum cleaner!’ Another lady asked about her cat who had been absent for three days.”26 Repeated complaints to the Atlanta Police Department’s administrative review process yielded the consistent response that the police had done no wrong. With a crushing casel­oad, and like so many young black men who have been harassed and stopped and illegally searched, Stevenson eventually dropped the matter.  However, unlike those similarly situated young black men, Stevenson did get one last minor victory. Just Mercy exposes all the racism, bigotry and sheer incompe­tence of Atlanta’s police. It also reveals a callous administrative indifference all the way up the chain of command.  Just Mercy shines a penetrating light on entrenched racism in our police and judicial systems. Given Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and a host of recent incidents, this exposure of indecent, systemic failure is essential reading.

On September 11, 2013, after struggling for years with disabilities and dementia, Walter McMillan died. At his funeral Bryan Stevenson told the congregation at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church:

Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent . . . . Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, ir­rational, and dangerous . . . . mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us . . . . Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, the real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill? 27

Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls Bryan Stevenson “America’s young Nelson Mandela.” Indeed.

_____________________

• Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, (2014) at 225.
• http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/national-polls-and-studies
• Alan W. Clarke, Procedural Labyrinths and the Injustice of Death: A Critique of Death Penalty Habeas Corpus (Part Two) , 30 U. Rich. L. Rev. 303, 355 (1996).
• World Prison Brief, Institute for Criminal Policy Research, available at http://www.pris­onstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All
• Id . http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total?field_re­gion_taxonomy_tid=All
• Death Penalty Information Center, Innocence and the Death Penalty (April 18, 2016) http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty.
• Robert Weisburg, Executing Justice: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution by James Liebman & the Columbia DeLuna Project , 93 Tex. L. Rev. 1179 (2014).
• Stevenson, supra note 1 at 293.
• Peter Applebome, Alabama Releases Man Held on Death Row for Six Years , N.Y. Times, Mar. 3, 1993, available at http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/03/us/alabama-releases-man-held-on-death-row-for-six-years.html.
• Jennifer Crossley Howard & Serge F. Kovaleski, ‘Mockingbird’ Reopens in Alabama, 11. Jennifer Crossley Howard & Serge F. Kovaleski, ‘Mockingbird’ Reopens in Alabama, and Drama Plays Out, N.Y, Times, April 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/books/a-mockingbird-reopens-in-alabama-and-drama-plays-out.html?_r=0.
• Peter Applebome, supra note 10, writes,

.               Mr. McMillian’s case, which was given national attention last fall on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” played out in Monroeville, Ala., best known as the home of the Harper Lee, whose “To Kill a Mockingbird,” told a painful story of race and justice in the small-town Jim Crow South. To many of his defenders, Mr. McMillian’s conviction for the killing seemed like an updated version of the book, in which a black man was accused of raping a white woman.”

• Stevenson, supra note 1, at 55.
• Stevenson writes, “It’s unclear how Tate was able to persuade Holman’s warden to house two pretrial detainees on death row, although Tate knew people at the prison from his days as a probation officer.” Id. at 53.
• Id. at 55–56.
• Stevenson, supra note 1, at 295.
• Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. ___ ; 132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012) held that life imprisonment for juveniles without the possibility of parole was unconstitutional. Bryan Stevenson argued the case for the juveniles. Stevenson, supra note 1, at 295-96.
• Stevenson, supra note 1, at 234.
• Id. at 230.
• Id. . at 233.

______________________

Alan W. Clarke is a professor of Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah and a contributing editor to National Lawyers Guild Review . His most recent book is Rendition to Torture, published by Rutgers University Press in 2012.

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Bryan Stevenson

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clock This article was published more than  9 years ago

Opinion Book review: ‘Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption’ by Bryan Stevenson

A story of justice and redemption.

By Bryan Stevenson Spiegel & Grau. 336 pp. $28

Rob Warden is executive director emeritus of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law.

Criminal justice in America sometimes seems more criminal than just — replete with error, malfeasance, racism and cruel, if not unusual, punishment, coupled with stubborn resistance to reform and a failure to learn from even its most glaring mistakes. And nowhere, let us pray, are matters worse than in the hard Heart of Dixie, a.k.a. Alabama, the adopted stomping ground of Bryan Stevenson, champion of the damned.

Stevenson, the visionary founder and executive director of the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, surely has done as much as any other living American to vindicate the innocent and temper justice with mercy for the guilty — efforts that have brought him, among myriad honors, a MacArthur genius grant and honorary degrees from Yale, Penn and Georgetown. Now 54, Stevenson has made his latest contribution to criminal justice in the form of an inspiring memoir titled "Just Mercy."

It will come as no surprise to those who have heard Stevenson speak or perused any of his briefs that “Just Mercy” is an easy read — a work of style, substance and clarity. Mixing commentary and reportage, he adroitly juxtaposes triumph and failure, neither of which is in short supply, against an unfolding backdrop of the saga of Walter McMillian, an innocent black Alabaman sentenced to death for the 1986 murder of an 18-year-old white woman.

Stevenson is something of an enigma. A lifelong bachelor, seemingly married to his work, he grew up in a working-class African American family in southern Delaware. Born five years after Brown v. Board of Education , he endured the indignities of the vestiges of Jim Crow. That, of course, might have set him on a path to champion the downtrodden.

When he was 16, however, his 86-year-old grandfather was murdered by adolescent marauders bent on nothing more than stealing the elderly man’s black-and-white TV. The trauma surrounding the senseless tragedy — occurring as it did in the wake of racially coded political rhetoric about crime — might have turned a lesser person into a reactionary zealot, but Stevenson took a higher road. Within a decade, as a newly minted lawyer, he forsook the wealth that was virtually guaranteed by his degrees from Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government, taking what amounted to a vow of poverty to pursue civil rights law in the South. He began at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta before moving to Alabama to start the Equal Justice Initiative.

Thirty years on, he has won relief for scores of condemned prisoners; exonerated a number of innocent ones; fought to end the death penalty and life sentences without parole for juveniles; and confronted, with admirable albeit limited success, abuse of the mentally ill, the mentally handicapped and children in prison.

Of all the victories, Stevenson clearly takes the greatest satisfaction in the exoneration of McMillian, whose case played out in Monroeville, Ala. — a town immortalized by Harper Lee in "To Kill a Mockingbird." McMillian's conviction rested on testimony so preposterous that it's astonishing anyone could have believed it, especially in the face of six alibi witnesses, including a police officer, who placed him at a fish fry 11 miles from the scene of the crime when it occurred.

The prosecution sponsored two key witnesses, both of whom lied and one of whom complained in a tape-recorded pretrial interview withheld from the defense that he was being coerced to lie. The other witness, seeking favorable treatment from the prosecution for crimes of his own, testified that he’d seen McMillian’s low-rider truck near the crime scene. It turned out, however, that McMillian had not modified his truck into a low-rider until weeks after the crime.

A jury from which the prosecution had systematically excluded African Americans found McMillian guilty but recommended a life sentence, rather than death. In 34 of the 36 states with death penalties then on their books, jury recommendations were binding, the exceptions being Alabama and Florida, where judges were — and still are — empowered to override jury recommendations. That’s what evocatively named Judge Robert E. Lee Key Jr. did in the McMillian case.

McMillian most likely would have been executed had Stevenson not turned to an unconventional court of last resort — “60 Minutes,” which in late 1992 aired a devastating segment on the case. Three months later, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals granted McMillian a new trial, and a few days after that, the prosecution dropped the charges.

Another sweet Stevenson victory grew out of his quest to understand why adolescents, like those who murdered his grandfather, are prone to commit violent acts with senseless, reckless abandon. Stevenson took on the representation of several clients sentenced to life in prison without parole for crimes committed as juveniles. In challenging their sentences, he emphasized, as he puts it in his memoir, “the incongruity of not allowing children to smoke, drink, vote . . . because of their well-recognized lack of maturing and judgment while simultaneously treating some of the most at-risk, neglected, and impaired children exactly the same as full-grown adults in the criminal justice system.”

One impaired child Stevenson represented was Evan Miller, who was 14 when he and two other youths beat a middle-aged man to death with a baseball bat after several hours of drinking and using drugs with him. Miller was sentenced to life without parole, but his cohorts accepted plea deals that gave them parole-eligible sentences. Stevenson took Miller's case to the U.S. Supreme Court , which in 2012 held in the case that mandatory life sentences without parole for children violated the Eighth Amendment.

Along the way, Stevenson suffered tragic defeats, some of which speak volumes about the politics of crime and punishment and the hypocrisy it breeds. A case in point is that of Michael Lindsey, who went to the Alabama electric chair in 1989, at age 28, for the murder of a 63-year-old neighbor woman. Lindsey’s guilt was not at issue, but he was black and the victim was white — a situation long known to make a harsh sentence likelier than when the races are reversed.

As in McMillian’s and 99 other Alabama cases so far, Lindsey’s jury recommended a life sentence, but the judge overrode the recommendation, sending him to death row. Stevenson sought clemency for Lindsey, but Gov. Guy Hunt denied it, declaring that he would not “go against the wishes of the community expressed by the jury” — although the jury, in fact, had expressed the wish that Lindsey be allowed to live. Never mind the truth.

A paramount problem with criminal justice in Alabama is that its trial judges are elected — as are those in 38 other states, according to the American Bar Association. Elected judges, not surprisingly, tend to behave like what they in fact are — politicians. As Stevenson explains, judicial candidates attract campaign contributions mostly from business interests in favor of tort reform or from civil trial lawyers against tort reform. The campaign financiers have little interest in criminal justice, but what matters to voters unschooled in tort reform is being tough on crime. “No judge wants to deal with attack ads that highlight the grisly details of a murder case in which the judge failed to impose the most severe punishment,” Stevenson points out.

Judicial override in capital cases has been substantially restricted by case law in Florida but remains unbridled in Alabama — which is and, despite Stevenson’s yeoman efforts, will remain for the foreseeable future a long way from Nirvana.

Thanks in significant part to Stevenson’s brilliance and dedication to a cause that hasn’t always been popular, the situation in Alabama and across the land is improving. Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he’s also a gifted writer and storyteller. His memoir should find an avid audience among players in the legal system — jurists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, legislators, academics, journalists — and especially anyone contemplating a career in criminal justice.

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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Paperback – August 18, 2015

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher One World
• Publication date August 18, 2015
• Dimensions 5.17 x 0.77 x 7.96 inches
• ISBN-10 9780812984965
• ISBN-13 978-0812984965
• Lexile measure 1130L
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Chapter One

Mockingbird Players

The temporary receptionist was an elegant African American woman wearing a dark, expensive business suit—a well-dressed exception to the usual crowd at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC) in Atlanta, where I had returned after graduation to work full time. On her first day, I’d rambled over to her in my regular uniform of jeans and sneakers and offered to answer any questions she might have to help her get acclimated. She looked at me coolly and waved me away after reminding me that she was, in fact, an experienced legal secretary. The next morning, when I arrived at work in another jeans and sneakers ensemble, she seemed startled, as if some strange vagrant had made a wrong turn into the office. She took a beat to compose herself, then summoned me over to confide that she was leaving in a week to work at a “real law office.” I wished her luck. An hour later, she called my office to tell me that “Robert E. Lee” was on the phone. I smiled, pleased that I’d misjudged her; she clearly had a sense of humor.

“That’s really funny.”

“I’m not joking. That’s what he said,” she said, sounding bored, not playful. “Line two.”

I picked up the line.

“Hello, this is Bryan Stevenson. May I help you?”

“Bryan, this is Robert E. Lee Key. Why in the hell would you want to represent someone like Walter McMillian? Do you know he’s reputed to be one of the biggest drug dealers in all of South Alabama? I got your notice entering an appearance, but you don’t want anything to do with this case.”

“This is Judge Key, and you don’t want to have anything to do with this McMillian case. No one really understands how depraved this situation truly is, including me, but I know it’s ugly. These men might even be Dixie Mafia.”

The lecturing tone and bewildering phrases from a judge I’d never met left me completely confused. “Dixie Mafia”? I’d met Walter McMillian two weeks earlier, after spending a day on death row to begin work on five capital cases. I hadn’t reviewed the trial transcript yet, but I did remember that the judge’s last name was Key. No one had told me the Robert E. Lee part. I struggled for an image of “Dixie Mafia” that would fit Walter McMillian.

“ ‘Dixie Mafia’?”

“Yes, and there’s no telling what else. Now, son, I’m just not going to appoint some out-of-state lawyer who’s not a member of the Alabama bar to take on one of these death penalty cases, so you just go ahead and withdraw.”

“I’m a member of the Alabama bar.”

I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, but I had been admitted to the Alabama bar a year earlier after working on some cases in Alabama concerning jail and prison conditions.

“Well, I’m now sitting in Mobile. I’m not up in Monroe­ville anymore. If we have a hearing on your motion, you’re going to have to come all the way from Atlanta to Mobile. I’m not going to accommodate you no kind of way.”

“I understand, sir. I can come to Mobile, if necessary.”

“Well, I’m also not going to appoint you because I don’t think he’s indigent. He’s reported to have money buried all over Monroe County.”

“Judge, I’m not seeking appointment. I’ve told Mr. McMillian that we would—” The dial tone interrupted my first affirmative statement of the phone call. I spent several minutes thinking we’d been accidentally disconnected before finally realizing that a judge had just hung up on me.

I was in my late twenties and about to start my fourth year at the SPDC when I met Walter McMillian. His case was one of the flood of cases I’d found myself frantically working on after learning of a growing crisis in Alabama. The state had nearly a hundred people on death row as well as the fastest-growing condemned population in the country, but it also had no public defender system, which meant that large numbers of death row prisoners had no legal representation of any kind. My friend Eva Ansley ran the Alabama Prison Project, which tracked cases and matched lawyers with the condemned men. In 1988, we discovered an opportunity to get federal funding to create a legal center that could represent people on death row. The plan was to use that funding to start a new nonprofit. We hoped to open it in Tuscaloosa and begin working on cases in the next year. I’d already worked on lots of death penalty cases in several Southern states, sometimes winning a stay of execution just minutes before an electrocution was scheduled. But I didn’t think I was ready to take on the responsibilities of running a nonprofit law office. I planned to help get the organization off the ground, find a director, and then return to Atlanta.

When I’d visited death row a few weeks before that call from Robert E. Lee Key, I met with five desperate condemned men: Willie Tabb, Vernon Madison, Jesse Morrison, Harry Nicks, and Walter McMillian. It was an exhausting, emotionally taxing day, and the cases and clients had merged together in my mind on the long drive back to Atlanta. But I remembered Walter. He was at least fifteen years older than me, not particularly well educated, and he hailed from a small rural community. The memorable thing about him was how insistent he was that he’d been wrongly convicted.

“Mr. Bryan, I know it may not matter to you, but it’s important to me that you know that I’m innocent and didn’t do what they said I did, not no kinda way,” he told me in the meeting room. His voice was level but laced with emotion. I nodded to him. I had learned to accept what clients tell me until the facts suggest something else.

“Sure, of course I understand. When I review the record I’ll have a better sense of what evidence they have, and we can talk about it.”

“But . . . look, I’m sure I’m not the first person on death row to tell you that they’re innocent, but I really need you to believe me. My life has been ruined! This lie they put on me is more than I can bear, and if I don’t get help from someone who believes me—”

His lip began to quiver, and he clenched his fists to stop himself from crying. I sat quietly while he forced himself back into composure.

“I’m sorry, I know you’ll do everything you can to help me,” he said, his voice quieter. My instinct was to comfort him; his pain seemed so sincere. But there wasn’t much I could do, and after several hours on the row talking to so many people, I could muster only enough energy to reassure him that I would look at everything carefully.

I had several transcripts piled up in my small Atlanta office ready to move to Tuscaloosa once the office opened. With Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s peculiar comments still running through my head, I went through the mound of records until I found the transcripts from Walter McMillian’s trial. There were only four volumes of trial proceedings, which meant that the trial had been short. The judge’s dramatic warnings now made Mr. McMillian’s emotional claim of innocence too intriguing to put off any longer. I started reading.

Even though he had lived in Monroe County his whole life, Walter McMillian had never heard of Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird. Monroe­ville, Alabama, celebrated its native daughter Lee shamelessly after her award-winning book became a national bestseller in the 1960s. She returned to Monroe County but secluded herself and was rarely seen in public. Her reclusiveness proved no barrier to the county’s continued efforts to market her literary classic—or to market itself by using the book’s celebrity. Production of the film adaptation brought Gregory Peck to town for the infamous courtroom scenes; his performance won him an Academy Award. Local leaders later turned the old courthouse into a “Mockingbird” museum. A group of locals formed “The Mockingbird Players of Monroe­ville” to pre­sent a stage version of the story. The production was so popular that national and international tours were organized to provide an authentic presentation of the fictional story to audiences everywhere.

Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root. The story of an innocent black man bravely defended by a white lawyer in the 1930s fascinated millions of readers, despite its uncomfortable exploration of false accusations of rape involving a white woman. Lee’s endearing characters, Atticus Finch and his precocious daughter Scout, captivated readers while confronting them with some of the realities of race and justice in the South. A generation of future lawyers grew up hoping to become the courageous Atticus, who at one point arms himself to protect the defenseless black suspect from an angry mob of white men looking to lynch him.

Today, dozens of legal organizations hand out awards in the fictional lawyer’s name to celebrate the model of advocacy described in Lee’s novel. What is often overlooked is that the black man falsely accused in the story was not successfully defended by Atticus. Tom Robinson, the wrongly accused black defendant, is found guilty. Later he dies when, full of despair, he makes a desperate attempt to escape from prison. He is shot seventeen times in the back by his captors, dying ingloriously but not unlawfully.

Walter McMillian, like Tom Robinson, grew up in one of several poor black settlements outside of Monroe­ville, where he worked the fields with his family before he was old enough to attend school. The children of sharecroppers in southern Alabama were introduced to “plowin’, plantin’, and pickin’ ” as soon as they were old enough to be useful in the fields. Educational opportunities for black children in the 1950s were limited, but Walter’s mother got him to the dilapidated “colored school” for a couple of years when he was young. By the time Walter was eight or nine, he became too valuable for picking cotton to justify the remote advantages of going to school. By the age of eleven, Walter could run a plow as well as any of his older siblings.

Times were changing—for better and for worse. Monroe County had been developed by plantation owners in the nineteenth century for the production of cotton. Situated in the coastal plain of southwest Alabama, the fertile, rich black soil of the area attracted white settlers from the Carolinas who amassed very successful plantations and a huge slave population. For decades after the Civil War, the large African American population toiled in the fields of the “Black Belt” as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, dependent on white landowners for survival. In the 1940s, thousands of African Americans left the region as part of the Great Migration and headed mostly to the Midwest and West Coast for jobs. Those who remained continued to work the land, but the out-migration of African Americans combined with other factors to make traditional agriculture less sustainable as the economic base of the region.

By the 1950s, small cotton farming was becoming increasingly less profitable, even with the low-wage labor provided by black sharecroppers and tenants. The State of Alabama agreed to help white landowners in the region transition to timber farming and forest products by providing extraordinary tax incentives for pulp and paper mills. Thirteen of the state’s sixteen pulp and paper mills were opened during this period. Across the Black Belt, more and more acres were converted to growing pine trees for paper mills and industrial uses. African Americans, largely excluded from this new industry, found themselves confronting new economic challenges even as they won basic civil rights. The brutal era of sharecropping and Jim Crow was ending, but what followed was persistent unemployment and worsening poverty. The region’s counties remained some of the poorest in America.

Walter was smart enough to see the trend. He started his own pulpwood business that evolved with the timber industry in the 1970s. He astutely—and bravely—borrowed money to buy his own power saw, tractor, and pulpwood truck. By the 1980s, he had developed a solid business that didn’t generate a lot of extra money but afforded him a gratifying degree of independence. If he had worked at the mill or the factory or had had some other unskilled job—the kind that most poor black people in South Alabama worked—it would invariably mean working for white business owners and dealing with all the racial stress that that implied in Alabama in the 1970s and 1980s. Walter couldn’t escape the reality of racism, but having his own business in a growing sector of the economy gave him a latitude that many African Americans did not enjoy.

That independence won Walter some measure of respect and admiration, but it also cultivated contempt and suspicion, especially outside of Monroe­ville’s black community. Walter’s freedom was, for some of the white people in town, well beyond what African Americans with limited education were able to achieve through legitimate means. Still, he was pleasant, respectful, generous, and accommodating, which made him well liked by the people with whom he did business, whether black or white.

Walter was not without his flaws. He had long been known as a ladies’ man. Even though he had married young and had three children with his wife, Minnie, it was well known that he was romantically involved with other women. “Tree work” is notoriously demanding and dangerous. With few ordinary comforts in his life, the attention of women was something Walter did not easily resist. There was something about his rough exterior—his bushy long hair and uneven beard—combined with his generous and charming nature that attracted the attention of some women.

Walter grew up understanding how forbidden it was for a black man to be intimate with a white woman, but by the 1980s he had allowed himself to imagine that such matters might be changing. Perhaps if he hadn’t been successful enough to live off his own business he would have more consistently kept in mind those racial lines that could never be crossed. As it was, Walter didn’t initially think much of the flirtations of Karen Kelly, a young white woman he’d met at the Waffle House where he ate breakfast. She was attractive, but he didn’t take her too seriously. When her flirtations became more explicit, Walter hesitated, and then persuaded himself that no one would ever know.

After a few weeks, it became clear that his relationship with Karen was trouble. At twenty-five, Karen was eighteen years younger than Walter, and she was married. As word got around that the two were “friends,” she seemed to take a titillating pride in her intimacy with Walter. When her husband found out, things quickly turned ugly. Karen and her husband, Joe, had long been unhappy and were already planning to divorce, but her scandalous involvement with a black man outraged Karen’s husband and his entire family. He initiated legal proceedings to gain custody of their children and became intent on publicly disgracing his wife by exposing her infidelity and revealing her relationship with a black man.

For his part, Walter had always stayed clear of the courts and far away from the law. Years earlier, he had been drawn into a bar fight that resulted in a misdemeanor conviction and a night in jail. It was the first and only time he had ever been in trouble. From that point on, he had no exposure to the criminal justice system.

When Walter received a subpoena from Karen Kelly’s husband to testify at a hearing where the Kellys would be fighting over their children’s custody, he knew it was going to cause him serious problems. Unable to consult with his wife, Minnie, who had a better head for these kinds of crises, he nervously went to the courthouse. The lawyer for Kelly’s husband called Walter to the stand. Walter had decided to acknowledge being a “friend” of Karen. Her lawyer objected to the crude questions posed to Walter by the husband’s attorney about the nature of his friendship, sparing him from providing any details, but when he left the courtroom the anger and animosity toward him were palpable. Walter wanted to forget about the whole ordeal, but word spread quickly, and his reputation shifted. No longer the hard-working pulpwood man, known to white people almost exclusively for what he could do with a saw in the pine trees, Walter now represented something more worrisome.

Fears of interracial sex and marriage have deep roots in the United States. The confluence of race and sex was a powerful force in dismantling Reconstruction after the Civil War, sustaining Jim Crow laws for a century and fueling divisive racial politics throughout the twentieth century. In the aftermath of slavery, the creation of a system of racial hierarchy and segregation was largely designed to prevent intimate relationships like Walter and Karen’s—relationships that were, in fact, legally prohibited by “anti-miscegenation statutes” (the word miscegenation came into use in the 1860s, when supporters of slavery coined the term to promote the fear of interracial sex and marriage and the race mixing that would result if slavery were abolished). For over a century, law enforcement officials in many Southern communities absolutely saw it as part of their duty to investigate and punish black men who had been intimate with white women.

Although the federal government had promised racial equality for freed former slaves during the short period of Reconstruction, the return of white supremacy and racial subordination came quickly after federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s. Voting rights were taken away from African Americans, and a series of racially restrictive laws enforced the racial hierarchy. “Racial integrity” laws were part of a plan to replicate slavery’s racial hierarchy and reestablish the subordination of African Americans. Having criminalized interracial sex and marriage, states throughout the South would use the laws to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Forbidding sex between white women and black men became an intense preoccupation throughout the South.

In the 1880s, a few years before lynching became the standard response to interracial romance and a century before Walter and Karen Kelly began their affair, Tony Pace, an African American man, and Mary Cox, a white woman, fell in love in Alabama. They were arrested and convicted, and both were sentenced to two years in prison for violating Alabama’s racial integrity laws. John Tompkins, a lawyer and part of a small minority of white professionals who considered the racial integrity laws to be unconstitutional, agreed to represent Tony and Mary to appeal their convictions. The Alabama Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1882. With rhetoric that would be quoted frequently over the next several decades, Alabama’s highest court affirmed the convictions, using language that dripped with contempt for the idea of interracial romance:

The evil tendency of the crime [of adultery or fornication] is greater when committed between persons of the two races. . . . Its result may be the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound policy affecting the highest interests of society and government.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 081298496X
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World; Reprint edition (August 18, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780812984965
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812984965
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1130L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.17 x 0.77 x 7.96 inches
• #5 in Criminology (Books)
• #6 in Black & African American Biographies
• #97 in Memoirs (Books)

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Bryan stevenson.

Bryan Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor of law at New York University Law School. He has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, argued five times before the Supreme Court, and won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color. He has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant.

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Caitlyn Bradburn

Training, curriculum, and program design

Book Report: Just Mercy

I first heard about Bryan Stevenson when I was working at the Kasungu District Prison in Malawi. I discovered his TED Talk and promptly shared it widely. As I am sharing it with you, now…

I watched that talk while working in the Kasungu District prisons. The enormity of his work humbled and impressed me. My familiarity with him grew while working at Partners In Health as he is one of the PIH board members. For some reason, I didn’t get around to reading his book, Just Mercy, until several years later. What was I waiting for?!

That should ring as not only an endorsement but a call to action…march down to your library and check it out! You won’t regret it.

The Activism of Bryan Stevenson

Mr. Stevenson represents those on death row. Those who are on death row are are overwhelmingly African American. In the book, he shares the arc of his life and tells the compelling story of how he started the Equal Justice Initiative. Equal Justice Initiative “is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society”. Bryan Stevenson fights racism and injustice as a part of his minute-to-minute work.

The story is important. In fact, I wish that we could have a national book club to collectively examine our values and priorities. Stevenson writes, “presumptions of guilt, poverty, racial bias, and a host of other social, structural, and political dynamics have created a system that is defined by error, a system in which thousands of innocent people now suffer in prison.”

He shares stories of a few of his cases–children tried as adults, people sentenced to death row with scant evidence that they were even at the scene of the crime. As I read, I celebrated those who made it OFF of death row, wanted to lay at the feet of Mr. Stevenson, and, of course, call my Senators (they are on speed dial lately!). Mr. Stevenson and his team commit themselves to this work. Yet, they only work with a fraction of the people in need his activism, representation, and his ardent belief in righting wrongs.

Read this book. I promise you won’t regret it.

Inspiration on Every Page

In conclusion, I’ll end this with a line from Mr. Stevenson’s TED Talk, one that always moves me and inspires me. I hope it evokes the same feelings in you…

 “ We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering. Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone’s humanity. I’ve learned very simple things doing the work that I do. It’s just taught me very simple things. I’ve come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I believe that for every person on the planet. I think if somebody tells a lie, they’re not just a liar. I think if somebody takes something that doesn’t belong to them, they’re not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer.  And because of that there’s this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don’t believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice. “

PS: A movie about Bryan Stevenson just came out ! Undoubtedly, it’ll be good!

PPS: Do you struggle with keeping love at the center of your social justice fight? This course may be for you!

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Home | Literature | Literary Genre | Drama | Just Mercy

Book Report: “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson

• Updated July 27, 2023
• Pages 7 (1 652 words)
• Literary Genre
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Table of Contents

Summary of Book

Experiences of racism, examples of external forces impact on individuals and families.

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson is a compelling story expressing the injustice of legal practices predominantly in southern states. Throughout the novel Stevenson exposes his audience to a handful of death row cases he worked on first hand. One of the most controversial cases Stevenson worked on was that of Walter McMillian, a man sentenced to death for a murder he had no relation to. By working with condemned men, Stevenson’s views of mercy changed drastically by the end of the novel. These cases demonstrate how both racism and external forces impact the incarcerated and their families.

Racism plays a very strong role in the imprisonment and treatment of the condemned men we are exposed to in this novel. Even though Walter McMillian had “an unquestionable alibi with close to a dozen witnesses,” the predominantly white jury pronounced him guilty of the murder of Ronda Morrison. (62) Because the murder took place in Alabama, the convict could not be identified, and the recently appointed sheriff was anxious to convict someone, it was easy to place the blame on an “African American man involved in an adulterous interracial affair”. (34) The arrest of McMillan was unjust and occurred based on the possibility that he was dangerous to society and not his past criminal history and reputation. It was a benefit to Sheriff Tate that Ralph Myers, a white man, was willing to falsely testify in court against McMillian. The conviction of an innocent man based on convenience and societal discrimination is morally wrong and substantially racist.

Another heartbreaking example of misconduct is presented in the case of “George Stinney, a fourteen-year-old black boy [who] was executed by the State of South Carolina on June 16, 1944.” (152) Stinney was accused and arrested for the murder of two white girls solely because he had admitted to having interacted with them the day of their death, when they asked George and his sister where they could find flowers to pick. Since George was a black male and had the last reported interaction with the girls, as soon as their bodies were found lifeless in a ditch he was immediately convicted, no questions asked. During his trial, “no African Americans were allowed inside the courthouse.” (158)

Furthermore, “George’s white court-appointed attorney… called no witnesses,” and “the prosecution’s only evidence was the sheriff’s testimony regarding Georges alleged confession.” (158) Years after Stinney’s execution, a white man was allegedly reported to having confessed to having killed the two girls. The murder of George Stinney was uncalled for and was executed under an insignificant amount of evidence. It is evident that Stinney was convicted primarily based on his race and not his actions.

The occurrence of an African American teenager getting shot by a cop after getting pulled over for a minor traffic violation can be defined as a racist act. The teen was said to have “reached down to the floor where he kept his gym bag to retrieve his newly issued driver’s license,” the officer on duty claimed that the new driver was reaching for a weapon and shot the teen, resulting in the death of a minor. (38) However, upon investigation, no weapon was found in the car. There have been numerous cases similar to this one in recent times. One of the most popular cases was the death of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African American teenager, who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a white man, while walking home after purchasing skittles and a drink at a local store. Both these cases demonstrate how deadly stereotyping individuals can be. Believing that one’s race is more dangerous and threatening than other races is morally unjust. A person should not be defined by their looks, but rather their actions.

Racism did not just occur to the condemned men, Stevenson, also addresses a time in which he experiences an inessential encounter with the police. Stevenson informes readers that he “had been parked on the street for about fifteen minutes listening to Sly,” when a SWAT car pulled up in front of his car and directed their spotlight at him. (39) Unaware of what he could have possibly done wrong, the author admits to feeling terrified during the futile interrogation. After an intense examination of both Stevenson and his car, the officers stated that “‘someone called about a suspected burglar.’” and that “‘there have been a lot of burglaries in [that] neighborhood.’” (42) The audacity of the community to call the police because they believed a black man, who was sitting in his car listening to music, was a suspected burglar and the SWAT team to illegally search Stevenson’s car and mistreat him, is horrific. The color of a person’s skin should not determine their future actions. Furthermore the assumption of associating someone with a crime based on their ethnicity is unethical.

The false conviction of George Stinney had a major impact on both him and his family. Once word got around that Stinney was being charged for the murder of the two white girls from across the tracks, his “father was … fired from his job; [and] his family was told to leave town or else they would be lynched.” (158) In a drastic measure to save their lives, Stinney’s family left town and George. With no family, help, or support, George faced his execution alone. Because George was so young, facing charges of murder alone with no family support must have been beyond terrifying.

Many children look to their parents, siblings and other family members for guidance during challenging times and the absence of this guidance can leave someone feeling overwhelmingly scared and alone. In addition to the negative impacts George was facing after his conviction, his family was also negatively affected. Threats of being lynched and the loss of Stinney’s father’s job are two external factors that impact families negatively. These events cause families to have to make quick and critical decisions that can drastically alter the lives of everyone in the family. The family decision to pack up and move in the middle of the night, leaving George behind, is a defining factor in future development of the family.

Another external force that impacts families are mental health issues. Avery Jenkins suffered from severe mental health problems, problems of which were not always seen and often overlooked or dismissed by multiple foster families. Avery was “frequently locked in a closet, denied food, and subject to beatings and other physical abuse” due to his inability to perform all the tasks presented to him in the correct manner or time. (197) The lack of proper care and support from these families left Avert homeless at the age of seventeen. It is hard living with a mental illness, let alone, living with one that a slim number of people acknowledge exists. In addition to the challenges mental health issues present to the person suffering from them, they also impact families. Having a child who is experiencing psychotic episodes, seizures, addiction problems, etc is challenging to handle, especially when the issue is not solely visible to the naked eye.

Furthermore, the incarceration of condemned men also has a negative impact on family life. Although in prison, some parents still want to protect their children from the cruelty of humanity. Henry, the first condemned man Stevenson met, kept putting off having his wife and kids visit him in prison because he feared he would have to give them the date of his execution. This impacts the family because it presents a severe disconnect between the inmate and his family. Not being able to see his children or wife for over two years demolishes the role Henry had in his family. Being a single parent is very challenging, especially when your partner is on death row, awaiting an execution date. Henry’s wife having to take on both his role and her role and his children having to grow and develop without a strong father figure in their life can have a very negative and stressful impact on the family as a whole.

External forces can also significantly impact minors being tried as adults in the federal court system. Charlie, a five foot tall, fourteen-year-old boy, weighing under 100 pounds, was convicted and placed in an adult prison for the murder of his mother’s boyfriend. Because Charlie was small for his age and in a prison with predominantly older men, he was an easy target. Charlie reported being beaten and sexually assaulted by the other inmates. These encounters terrified and annihilated the young boy. Although Charlie was moved into a protected single cell and his case was eventually transferred to a juvenile court, the encounters he faced with the other prisoners his first few nights in jail have the power to impact him the rest of his life. Sexual assault is a very serious crime and can be challenging to fully recover from, especially if it happened at such a young age.

Taking everything into account, external forces and racism impact families and individuals in a wide variety of ways. It is hard to escape challenges and obstacles that life tends to throw at us, especially if you, or someone in your family, is being incarcerated. The novel Just Mercy, explores how different families and individuals deal with these challenges presented to them and how Bryan Stevenson works with them to help them receive proper legal representation. Mercy is defined as showing compassion towards someone who it is within your capability to punish or harm. In his novel, Stevenson shows mercy to clients other members of the legal system would rather harm. The stories told in this novel shape the way individuals see the legal system and the treatment of prisoners in a extremely unique way.

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Book Report: “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson. (2022, Feb 20). Retrieved from https://samploon.com/book-report-just-mercy-by-bryan-stevenson/

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“Just Mercy” stars Michael B. Jordan (left) as a young Harvard J.D. working to free an innocent death row inmate played by Jamie Foxx (right).

© 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

‘Just Mercy’ in the criminal justice system

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Harvard professors discuss new film, the story of Harvard Law alum Bryan Stevenson

“ Just Mercy ,” the film based on the memoir of the same name by Harvard Law graduate Bryan Stevenson, ends with a sobering statistic: For every nine people executed in this country, one person on death row has been exonerated.

Yet, at a talk in Boston following a recent screening of the film — which stars Michael B. Jordan as a young Stevenson, M.P.P./J.D. ’85, working to free innocent death row inmate Walter McMillian, played by Jamie Foxx — Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker noted that makes the United States No. 1 in a problematic category.

“We remain today the only developed Western democracy that continues to retain the death penalty,” said Steiker, who directs the Criminal Justice Policy Program at the Law School and has written extensively on capital punishment. She called the U.S. practice something of a “historical accident” in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to declare it unconstitutional in 1972 because governing statutes “gave sentencers too much discretion that yielded arbitrary and discriminatory results.”

Blowback from the court of public opinion, a crime wave, and the administrations of two Republican presidents who appointed five justices to the court soon led to another pendulum swing. Four years later, the “American death penalty was back in business with a vengeance, as we might say. And for the next 25 years — the 25 years that included the story of Walter McMillian’s conviction and death sentence — American death sentences soared,” said Steiker. “So from 1976 to about 2000, the U.S. quickly went to being one of the world’s leading executors every year.”

Cornell William Brooks (right) and Carol S. Steiker discuss the film in a Q&A session.

Photo by Lorin Granger

But then things changed again. Beginning in 2000, the death penalty began a “free fall” spurred by the use of DNA evidence, said Steiker. “The public discovered that in fact many people, not just Walter McMillian, had been tried and wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for crimes that they didn’t commit … That fact, more than anything else, has moved the views of many people in the American public against the death penalty.”

Thirty states still have the death penalty, but its use is at record lows. According to a report by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center , 2018 marked the fourth consecutive year with fewer than 30 executions and 50 death sentences, reflecting a long-term decline of capital punishment.

The film follows Stevenson’s earliest days with the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, and his struggles to fight for McMillian in the face of racism, intimidation, and malfeasance. Stevenson joined the nonprofit organization that counsels those who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons, those unable to pay for effective representation, and those who have been denied a fair trial, in 1989, a year after he met McMillian. Stevenson proved that prosecution witnesses had been pressured to lie on the stand, and McMillian’s conviction was overturned and he was released in 1993, after six years on death row for a crime he had not committed.

But not all of Stevenson’s clients are innocent. In the movie, he also fights for the life of Herbert Richardson, a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who was charged with murder after planting a bomb on the porch of a woman who had broken up with him.  Richardson was executed in 1989. Teaching other lawyers “how to advocate on behalf of guilty defendants, how to advocate for their lives, how to put on what’s called a mitigating case, how to basically show a jury … the humanity of a person, about how a person is more than the worst thing they have ever done, and how to plead to a jury for mercy, for just mercy,” is another of Stevenson’s lasting legacies, said Steiker.

“The eloquence of [Stevenson’s] example is that hope is morally chosen, not empirically demonstrated. We have to choose to be hopeful, we have to choose to believe.” Cornell Williams Brooks

Cornell Williams Brooks , who took part in the discussion with Steiker, said the film should “be studied like a casebook and a point of meditation.”

Brooks, professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice at Harvard Kennedy School, sees lessons for aspiring lawyers and policymakers in Stevenson’s embrace of proximity, the notion of getting as close as possible to the suffering and despair of those in need. “Bryan doesn’t interview his client from across the room; he is proximate, he is close, he is in touch with his client,” said Brooks. And he is in touch with his client’s “story as a human being.”

Brooks also highlighted the importance of storytelling in the film and the ways in which Stevenson brings multiple voices to McMillian’s defense, adding a “moral gravitas” to the narrative and allowing his “humanity to come to the fore.”

For Brooks, the film also delivers on hope.

“The eloquence of [Stevenson’s] example is that hope is morally chosen, not empirically demonstrated,” Brooks said. “We have to choose to be hopeful, we have to choose to believe.”

In “Just Mercy,” Michael B. Jordan’s character advocates for incarcerated people facing the death penalty.

Steiker and Brooks urged students to think about the broad range of approaches available to them to work against the death penalty, including arguing for someone’s innocence and humanity, the skyrocketing costs from administering the death penalty, and the idea of forming coalitions with unlikely advocates such as prison wardens, guards, and police officers.

“Lots of things appeal to different people,” said Steiker. “You’ve got to study your target audience and you have to know what’s going to appeal to them.”

More broadly, Brooks encouraged his listeners to consider a historical framing when confronting institutional racism in the criminal justice system and beyond. “Talking about lynching, talking about the new Jim Crow, talking about stop-and-frisk being a digitized 21st-century version of slave captures and slave patrollers” is key, he said. “Simply telling the truth about racism [is] necessary but not always sufficient.”

“It’s time for us to take a step back … it’s a question of reflecting on what our moral values are as a society,” said Lina Iddisah, who is pursuing a master’s degree in public policy at the Kennedy School.

Stevenson has pushed the historical narrative forward in Alabama with his most recent efforts, including the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration , and the nearby National Memorial for Peace and Justice dedicated to thousands of victims of racial injustice and lynching. Though not in attendance for the talk, which was sponsored by the Law School and Kennedy School, he made a brief appearance, introducing the film in a three-minute video.

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“I think we are living at a time when we have to be resolute in combatting the politics of fear and anger,” said Stevenson. “Fear and anger is what gave rise to the wrongful conviction of William McMillian. It’s what allowed institutions to turn their back on fair and just treatment. We are living at a time where in too many communities our system treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. There is a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to some people — black people, brown people, people who are different — and to combat this we need a community of people who are just willing to talk about what justice requires.”

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Meta is limiting how much political content users see. Here's how to opt out of that

Rachel Treisman

Meta is rolling out new changes to Instagram and Threads, automatically limiting the amount of political content users see from accounts they do not follow. Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Meta is rolling out new changes to Instagram and Threads, automatically limiting the amount of political content users see from accounts they do not follow.

Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads — is making good on its promise to tamp down the amount of political posts that users see on their feeds.

Meta said in early February that Instagram and Threads would stop recommending political content from accounts that users don't already follow. It said it would roll out the changes "slowly over time," though did not specify when.

The change started unrolling for users last week, Meta confirmed to NPR on Monday. And Instagram users quickly started noticing that their default settings had changed to limit content that is "likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large," as the app now puts it.

Meta's Threads wants to become a 'friendly' place by downgrading news and politics

The change has caught even the most online off guard, with many users criticizing Meta for limiting political content in a year when the U.S. and several other countries will be holding pivotal elections — and for doing so with relatively little warning.

And many noted that Meta's definition of political content — "potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics" — appears rather broad.

The company has refused to further clarify what exactly constitutes political content under its cryptic definition.

But the move is in line with a yearslong shift away from news across Meta's services. Last year, the company's executives said Threads would not boost posts about news and social issues, angering many who turn to social media to stay up to date.

Spokesperson Dani Lever told several media outlets that the change builds on "years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted."

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Meta will start labeling ai-generated images on instagram and facebook.

While company executives argue that the shift away from news is what users want, experts say Meta is also trying to distance itself from accusations of political bias and being blamed for the rise of misinformation and the growth of online extremism.

What the change does — and how to undo it

Meta has emphasized that the new setting won't affect content from accounts that people already follow and that it gives them the option to choose how much political content they get recommended otherwise.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on Threads last month that the change will influence what people see on their main feeds of Instagram and Threads, like the explore page, reels, feed recommendations and suggested users.

"Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person's appetite for it," Mosseri said.

You can update your preferences in the app to avoid Instagram limiting political content. Instagram/Screenshots and annotations by NPR hide caption

You can update your preferences in the app to avoid Instagram limiting political content.

Meta has stressed that people who want political recommendations can still opt in to getting them. Here's how:

• Go to your Instagram profile and tap the three horizontal lines in the top-right corner to open the "Settings and activity" tab.
• Scroll down to the "What you see" section and click on "Content preferences."
• Open the "Political content" page and turn on the "Don't limit political content" option.

Meta is characterizing the change as an extension of its current approach to political content.

It made significant changes to its algorithm in recent years, after mounting evidence and criticism of the role that Facebook and Instagram played in sowing misinformation and polarization in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections. Facebook has increasingly leaned into entertainment and away from news, disrupting traffic for many major publishers .

New study shows just how Facebook's algorithm shapes conservative and liberal bubbles

"People have told us they want to see less political content, so we have spent the last few years refining our approach on Facebook to reduce the amount of political content — including from politicians' accounts — you see in Feed, Reels, Watch, Groups You Should Join, and Pages You May Like," Meta explained in February .

It said Facebook users will also get the choice to opt in to political recommendations "at a later date."

NPR's Bobby Allyn contributed reporting.

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