Brina's Reviews > Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

I was just discussing in one of my goodreads groups, a weekly question is “are you in any face to face book clubs?” I personally am not but my father is in a group that meets monthly and he is one of the coordinators. Always at a loss for what to read, he asks me for titles that he thinks his group will enjoy and gives them choices to vote from. Most of the books read are ones that my mother or I suggested. This time the table was turned. My father had read Just Mercy in his group last year and kept telling me to read it. He noted that this book generated the most discussion for the year and told me that the author is one of those special once in a generation people. For whatever reason, I kept putting this one off until I heard about the movie starring Michael B Jordan, one of the top actors in Hollywood today. As one who has always had a book before movie rule in my house, I finally picked up Just Mercy in anticipation of the movie, and I was glad that I decided to go on this enlightening journey.

Bryan Stevenson comes from poverty in small town Delaware. His grandmother was the daughter of freed slaves and everyone in his extended family never gave up on him, in spite of his impoverished surroundings. Through grades and luck he ended up at Harvard Law School, no small task, and upon graduation moved to Atlanta to work in the Southern Defense Equality Foundation, which as a nonprofit provided defense attorneys to prisoners on death row or life terms for no fee. These prisoners came from low income situations where they often times had little to no money to pay an attorney for their original trial. They were more often than not people of color or whites in low income situations, and in the prejudiced south, the color or financial situation of the client usually lead to conviction. Stevenson’s first case in this book was with a death row inmate named Henry. The two men found a kindred spark in each other, which lead Stevenson to stay in Atlanta and work toward fair treatment to all prisoners. His work at the SDEF lead to him founding the Equality Justice Initiative (EJI) located in Montgomery, Alabama, an organization whose goal is to provide attorneys to all prisoners on death row regardless of their station in life. Even though many of these prisoners are in helpless situations, Stevenson and his legal team were determined to help and provide justice for as many inmates who need their assistance as possible.

Stevenson details statistics of prisoners on death row and many of his findings are alarming. Just the number of teenagers facing life in prison after being tried as adults is eye popping and enough to have a reader reaching for tissues. After Supreme Court verdicts in 2010 and 2012, teenagers would no longer face life in prison and many times have their terms reduced or eliminated. The EJI took on many of these no longer teenagers as clients following the Supreme Court verdict, which resulted in many overturned verdicts, often allowing prisoners who had been imprisoned for twenty to thirty years for crimes done as adolescents to be set free. Two men, Mr Caston and Mr Carter had been imprisoned in Louisiana for fifty years. Following one of the Supreme Court rulings, Stevenson argued for the two men at a circuit court, and they were both set free. At the time the court room was quiet and visitors began to applaud in one of the more emotional moments of the book. Mr Carter had a mother who was nearly one hundred and she stayed alive to see her son go free, and thankfully she was able to live to see that day happen. Just Mercy is full of emotional moments like Mr Carter’s story and had me reaching for tissues on more than one occasion. Sadly, however, Mr Carter was not the most absurd story related by Stevenson.

The centerpiece of the book so to speak is the case of Walter McMillian of Monroeville, Alabama, who was falsely accused of murder. McMillian who was black did not have a fair trial the first time around because local officials were looking to find closure for the family of the victim. Even though Stevenson took on McMillian’s case twenty years after the peak of the civil rights movement, in rural Alabama law makers were still prejudiced against people of color. Sadly, McMillian stood little chance, that is until Stevenson took his case and the EJI uncovered all the miscarriages of justice surrounding it. Walter McMillian’s case reads like a real life A Time to Kill, but, unfortunately, his case is true. McMillian spent over ten years on death row for a crime he did not commit, all the while keeping his sense of humor and dignity. Alabama has the highest number of inmates die by lethal injection in the nation during the modern death penalty era (since 1976), and the percentage that is people of color is overwhelming. Inmates even had a name for the chair- Yellow Mama- because it had been used too many times to count. Yet, EJI did not give up hope and there have been more stories like Walter McMillian’s and the others detailed in this book over the years as the organization has risen to international prominence.

Besides Walter McMillian and Mr Carter, I must have shed the most tears over Marsha Colby, a mother falsely accused of murder, and Charlie, a thirteen year old tried as an adult and who suffered trauma and abuse in prison. Both of these stories were among Stevenson’s early successes. He notes that since the Supreme Court rulings of nearly a decade ago both the number of deaths penalty deaths and number of people incarcerated nationally have slowly begun to go down. Rather than throw away the nation’s problems and lock the key, first time offenders, especially teenagers, can begin a life of rehabilitation. With organizations like EJI and gifted lawyers like Bryan Stevenson, there is hope for those people who otherwise would have had none. What a special man. It was tough to read this account as the conditions in prison are too inhumane to note in detail. I just hope that Michael B Jordan gives Bryan Stevenson the justice he well deserves.

4.5 stars