Just Mercy: Book summary and reviews of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

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CarolK

Justice, Just Justice
I often think that my grandparents and parents lived in interesting times. They saw so many things come about in their day. Theirs were exciting times. Women won the right to vote, slaves were freed, and medical advancements were plenty. It was the time of The Industrial Revolution, electricity, the telephone, planes, trains, and automobiles so to speak. I tend to downplay the important breakthroughs of my life and times, Television, Computers, a second industrial revolution of Technology, several wars, the quest for Space, and The Civil Rights Movement.

The debate about Capital punishment and the death penalty has been one I have tussled with from my teens to this day. The older I get, the more I read, the more I lean to the correctness and justification for its abolishment in our state. I haven’t come to this decision lightly; it’s a real struggle for me. Perhaps this conflict of soul is why books such as Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption interest me so much.

Bryan Stevenson didn’t start out walking the path to where he is today. While a student at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, he thought he might choose a career in music or sports. He majored in political science and philosophy and eventually decided on law school. While a student at Harvard in the early 80’s, Stevenson participated in an internship in Atlanta, Georgia with The Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC), relating to race and poverty. During this time he spent many hours seeking appeals for inmates on death row.

”I wasn’t prepared to meet a condemned man.”

"I had never seen the inside of a maximum security prison and certainly had never been on death row.”

Steve Bright, the head of the project, met his plane. He told Bryan

”Capital punishment means ‘them without the capital get the punishment.’ We can’t help people on death row without help from people like you.”

It came time for Stevenson to meet one of the men in a case they were working on. Can you imagine this inexperienced, twenty-three year old driving himself to this high security prison to meet with a man convicted of murder and sentenced to die? Stevenson knew little about capital punishment and had not taken a class in criminal procedure. He wasn’t even certain he wanted to be a lawyer or confident that he could make a difference in the race or poverty issues that motivated him thus far. It is here that his course is set and his lifetime work begins, even if he was not quite aware of the full impact as yet. His mission was to be to assure the inmate that he could not be executed anytime soon. He meets Henry and ends up apologizing, admitting he is just a law student. After the initial awkwardness they go on to talk for three hours about anything and everything. When it’s time to leave Henry just asks that Stevenson come back again. As Henry leaves the visitation room he sings a part of the hymn On Higher Ground:

After finishing his degree, Stevenson begins taking on cases. One that is documented in detail is that of Walter McMillan, a black man accused of murdering a white woman. There are many others. In my experience of listening to the author narrate his book I couldn’t help but shake my head at the wrongness of many of the convictions. There were times when I had to stop listening and needed to wipe away the tears at man’s inhumanity to man. Mental illness, children tried as adults, minorities, poverty and race played a large part in many of the cases explored.

Ultimately Bryan Stevenson establishes The Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit in Montgomery, Alabama that represents wrongful convictions and has won many exonerations.

This is a book that will stay with me. It is an important book. I plan to make a donation to The Equal Justice Initiative. That just seems right.

In the end it became more a matter of just justice than just mercy for me. That is all I wanted, Just Justice!