A Belated Good Read: Just Mercy

I completed my read of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, a memoir of the early legal career of Bryan Stevenson. The major conflict in the story is between Stevenson and the rampant corruption in the justice system that had emerged as a result of America’s contentious racial history. 

The book was published in 2014, drew a wide readership and won many prizes. I bought it 3 years ago but had left it on my bookshelf due to my new passion in classic works of world literature. Having studied six of Shakespeare’s plays in the past four months, I decided to digress a bit and opened this long-shelved book and was attracted by Bryan Stevenson's bio: an American lawyer, social justice activist, law professor at New York University School of Law, and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and, the most interesting of all, his birthday is only a few months different from mine. This closeness attracted me and I read it through in the following days.

I was particularly fascinated by the fact that the major scene of the book was set in the historic town of Monroeville, AL where author Harper Lee grew up and wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which would become a classic of modern American literature, dealing with racial injustice and also addressing issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the Deep South. 

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, the year after I was born in Taiwan. I had not been aware of the book until recently due to cultural and geographic distance. However, growing up I remembered trailers of the namesake film released in 1962, starring Gregory Peck, a phenomenal star recognized around the world. So, reading Just Mercy reminds me of my next must-read (and watch): To Kill a Mockingbird!

To me the story behind it is often  more appealing than the story itself. To this end, in the background of the book was not just Harper Lee and her novel, but also Rosa Parks, the mother of the freedom movement, and the Montgomery bus boycott, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.,  the prominent leader in the civil rights movement beginning in 1955 utill his assassination in 1968.

A good part of the book explores the phenomenon of mass incarceration, which means that the United States criminalizes and incarcerates more of its own people than any other country in the world, and inflicts enormous harm primarily on the most vulnerable groups: poor people of color. In the book Stevenson talked about the four institutions that he believed had shaped the country’s approach to race and justice: slavery; the post-Reconstruction era of terror, which reinforced the racial hierarchy; Jim Crow and legalized racial segregation; and mass incarceration, which disproportionately targeted people of color. 

Established after the US Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, also known as KKK, is an American white supremacist, far-right terrorist organization and hate group, known for their targeting African Americans, Jews, and Catholics. In the book its ideology affected the trial of Walter McMillian, an innocent prisoner on death row whose story occupies a half of the chapters of the book, because the chief Judge, John Patterson, was the KKK-backed former Alabama governor.

In the book Stevenson vividly described how a condemned prisoner was inhumanely and painfully executed on the electric chair: for a certain reason the electrocution had to be administered three times because the prisoner was still alive after being shocked twice. The entire process lasted an unbelievable 14 minutes before the prisoner was dead. The electric chair was nicknamed Yellow Mama, serving prisoner executions in the state of Alabama from 1927 to 2002.

There are many legal terms mentioned in the book, among them I was most impressed by "peremptory challenge": a right in jury selection for the attorneys to reject a certain number of potential jurors without stating a reason. With this right, the jury always ended up with all or nearly all white jurors in a state where a majority of its population was black.

Other legal terms I learned from the read include affidavit, perjury and judicial override, and I was especially interested in the third term, which means a judge overrules a jury's sentencing determination, and replaces it with a harsher punishment in most though not all cases. Judicial overrides were once exercised in the states of Alabama, Delaware, Florida, and Indiana, and have been abolished across the US now because they are unconstitutional.

There are many turns and twists that Stevenson experienced through, in his words, closeness to the prisoners on death row. In particular, I love the anecdote in which he, an intern of the Atlanta-based Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC), met his first death row client Henry, merely to deliver the news that Henry would not be executed this year. Stevenson awkwardly apologized because he was just a law student and not a real lawyer yet, but Henry felt relieved and joyful because Stevenson was the first person caring and telling him about his case. At the end of the interview, Henry sang a religious hymn, making Stevenson feel uplifted and see the cause of his work.

Apart from the book, I also watched an episode of the US TV program 60 Minutes. The episode was produced in 1992, when Walter McMillian was still imprisoned yet the case already attracted attention nationwide in the US, and that's why the episode was produced. Finally, McMillian was released in 1993 after spending six years on death row for a crime he did not commit.

Religion remains where people can find their inner peace under difficult conditions, including those on death row. Another anecdote that impressed me greatly was the execution of Herbert Richardson, a Vietnam War veteran with PTSD. Stevenson started to hum a hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross,” that Herbert requested be played at his execution, which calmed him and his wife.

The other injustice showcased in the book is the prevalence of juveniles sentenced to life without parole and juveniles detained in adult prisons, with rapes, abuses and other traumatic experiences following. the Supreme Court later ruled these life-without-parole sentences for juveniles unconstitutional. 

While darkness and hopelessness overwhelmed most pages of the book, victorious moments did occur, and it was particularly uplifting when Mrs. Williams finally showed up at the hearing. Mrs. Williams was chosen as a representative of the Black community, but was unable to enter the courtroom because the guard dog brought back horrific memories of attacks against Black people who marched for civil rights. Despite her initial fear, she found the courage to get past the dog on the second day, and announced several times to the courtroom that she was here. Stevenson understood that her words meant that she felt called to be part of the fight for justice. 

I'm not a Christian, but I found Psalm 130 perfectly matches the title of the book. I'm not sure if Stevenson drew inspiration from it for the naming of the book, but with the finding now I think I understand the idea of closeness, brokenness, just mercy and redemption that Stevenson articulated in the book.

Additionally, Stevenson founded Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 1989. EJI is a non-profit organization, based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who may have been denied a fair trial. 

The book was adapted into a film with the same name, released in 2019. It explores the work of young defense attorney Bryan Stevenson who represents poor people on death row in the South, featuring his work with Walter McMillian, who had been wrongfully convicted of the murder of a young woman. 

It was a belated yet thought-provoking and reflective read. I hope I'll read To Kill a Mockingbird soon, too.