Fifty Books Project 2023

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

We have a choice.  We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing.  Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our humanity.

This is a beautiful and powerfully written book that combines Stevenson's own life story with that of  many of his clients, primarily Walter McMillan - an innocent man railroaded for a murder who spent years on death row and was only exonerated because of the work of Stevenson's organization, The Equal Justice Initiative.

In a sense, this is three books.  The first is a deep dive into the politics and history that drive the death penalty in America, the second, an autobiography of a working class kid who makes it to Harvard Law School and goes on to found a major non-profit, while the third is  a murder mystery that keeps you turning pages as you find the evidence against McMillan shockingly inadequate and yet watch the power structure in his Alabama town continually thwart efforts at justice.  Any one of these approaches would make this a rich read.  Stevenson has a gift for boiling down complex history into approachable and clear narratives, so that the various Supreme Court cases that are the building blocks of death penalty law in America are explained and put into the context of the history of lynch law and mass incarceration.  Stephenson's own life story is inspiring, and the book could have used a little more of this.  We get little of his childhood, and only occasional glimpses of his non-working life (though at times it becomes clear that he has little non-working life to tell about) we do get his dismay at the career paths of his peers at Harvard and his own developing sense of how to do the work of justice.  And we slowly get a picture of how his childhood, his parents, his church, led him to this work.  While the book is not directly religious, his own connection to the church and his love and respect for other church goers builds throughout the text.  As in the passage quoted above, there is no doubt that Stevenson's passion for redemption is based in his view of christianity.  

Having been a best-seller and award winner, the book has now been sold to the movies and I can only assume that the movie will center on the story of Walter McMillan, a charming, working class lumber worker who is arrested and charged with a vicious murder despite the easily obtainable evidence that he could not have done it (his alibi is backed up by literally dozens of people).  However a combination of racism, classism, political expedience and really shoddy legal work by overworked and underpaid defense attorneys lands him on death row.  The story that follows is tense and dramatic and sad until (spoiler alert) at the last possible moment ...

Along the way, Stevenson makes it clear that McMillan's is not an isolated case - he gives us shorter, more contained narratives of a dozen other cases.  What emerges is a death penalty"system" that  corrupt and racist in its methods and barbaric in its outcomes.  Stevenson also mentions books that have helped him understand this world - even as it is clear that he understands it from his own life experience, so that Just Mercy ends up being the kind of book that will lead you to other reading.  Few other books have been able to blend history, jurisprudence, narrative and personal voice as effectively as Stevenson has done here.