Book Report: Just Mercy

25. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) (12/31/25)

Thanks to my alphabet project, I finally picked up this book. It's eye-opening, about the criminal justice system in this country, by the man who, in 1989, founded the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to help individuals unjustly sentenced to death row. Their work spread to helping children sentenced to life in adult prisons and many other concerns. Several Supreme Court cases have been decided on EJI lawyers' testimony.

This book details one case in particular, that of Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to death based on false evidence extracted by corrupt officials in Alabama. The plain fact of the matter was clear—Walter was miles away from the incident he was later arrested for, the murder of a young woman in a dry cleaners, and he had dozens of corroborating witnesses. But he was Black, and the prosecutors needed a perp. In telling his story, Stevenson outlines the arbitrariness and intractability of the US justice system, especially in Southern states where Jim Crow is still very much alive and well. 

Interspersed are many other stories, of individuals arrested for crimes and dealt unjust punishments. Stevenson gets to know these people individually and makes them all real to us readers. Some of them—including Walter McMillian—he succeeded in getting released from prison. Others, at the end of the book, are still awaiting clemency. The stories he details take place over the course of years, in some cases decades. 

In 2020 this book was made into a highly rated film, Just Mercy. Here is the trailer. 

The Equal Justice Initiative is still going strong. They explain their project(s) better than I can. The page on criminal justice reform is worth a look, if you're interested. 

Another feature of the site is a Racial Justice Calendar, which provides a day-by-day calendar of significant events in our country's racial/racist history. Today, December 31, 118 years ago, for example, in a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Judge Thomas Norwood, a former U.S. senator, advocated the death penalty for Black people in interracial relationships. 

The "Our Work" tab for EJI provides these links:

There is no end of work to be done.