By Christine Sheller
Just Mercy is a weaving of personal narrative,
storytelling, and reasons to hope in the midst of a criminal justice system
that’s broken. Stevenson begins with
some facts about incarceration and execution, along with his story about how he
came to be founder and director of EJI- Equal Justice Initiative.
His journey
from law school to SPDC- Southern Prisoners Defense Committee- to EJI is
interesting, but the work he gets into is absolutely riveting.
Stevenson, throughout the book, follows one of his first
cases, of one particular man, hailing from Monroeville, Alabama who had a
wrongful conviction and was an innocent man on death row in an Alabama
prison. The fight for his exoneration
spans years. In the midst of this story,
he tells many smaller stories of other incarcerated men and women and
youth. He first focuses on wrongful
convictions then adds on other projects as well, most notably minors serving in
adult prisons for juvenile crimes where they were either innocent, or they were
too young and were intellectually or emotionally deficit to have to serve time; Stevenson then adds a focus at EJI on ending
juveniles serving time in adult prisons, or in lifetime sentences. By the time he wrote his book, he also had
started an educational program within EJI and has numerous staff attorneys and
interns.
His is also a commentary on racism, on classism, and
sexism. The case the book follows most
closely is the story of an African- American man from Alabama who became
accused in a local murder after all leads led nowhere, until a troubled,
deranged man made up a story that included Walter McMillian. The local police and sheriff’s departments
pushed their way through the legal system, and eventually Walter was condemned
to death.
The criminal justice system is broken. Stevenson writes extensively about injustices
in our American justice system. It is so
encouraging to hear him tell of how he’s worked on hundreds of cases and won
justice for them.
In the beginning of his book, Stevenson lays out the
landscape of the changing atmosphere of our justice system in the last forty to
fifty years.. In the 1980’s when he
first visited someone on death row as a law student, America was in the first
stages of a “radical transformation” that led to the U.S. being an
“unprecedentedly harsh and punitive nation” that resulted in mass imprisonment
“that has no historic parallel” (Stevenson
15). The prison population increased
from the early 1970’s with 300,000 to 2.3 million today. There are approximately 6 million people on
probation or parole. One in every
fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 was expected to go to jail or
prison. One in every three black male
babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated (Stevenson 15;
citing Bonczar, Thomas in “Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population,
1974- 2001”).
Quoting Stevenson again, “We have shot, hanged, gassed, electrocuted,
and lethally injected hundreds of people to carry out legally sanctioned
executions. Thousands more await their
execution on death row. Some states have
no minimum age for prosecuting children as adults; we’ve sent a quarter million
kids to serve long prison terms, some under the age of twelve. For years we’ve been the only country in the
world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole; nearly three
thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison.” (Stevenson 15) Like stated previously, this becomes a larger
project for him later in the book- helping juveniles. The other atrocity about juveniles in adult
prisons, is that they are at more risk of being the victim of violence or rape
by other inmates. At the same time,
women inmates are at risk of being sexually assaulted by male guards and prison
staff. Stevenson relayed that some of
his clients experienced these things.
As the title suggests, this story is a “story of justice and
redemption.” Stevenson is a gifted
lawyer, and relentless, not giving up, always finding another angle when one
idea/ push in the legal system leads to a dead end. He tells a story of his own childhood memory
of redemption. He gives statistics on
juveniles being gifted with exoneration or lesser sentences after a landmark Supreme
Court ruling Stevenson worked on.
Finally, he suggests that just mercy includes the question
about the death penalty: the question is
not: does a prisoner deserve capital punishment, but do we deserve to
kill? He relates the inspiration he
gained from his client, Walter McMillian.
“Mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and
transformative when it is directed at the undeserving.” Walter had forgiven his naysayers and
accusers. Stevenson says of McMillian,
“...In the end, it was just mercy toward others that allowed him to recover a
life worth celebrating, a life that rediscovered the love and freedom that all
humans desire, a life that overcame death and condemnation…” (Stevenson 314)
Christine Sheller is coordinator and editor at Iowa Peace
Network.
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