There is still much to be done. That is shameful and I'm happy to have read this book and have my eyes opened even more to the injustices in our system. View all 22 comments. Susan Kietzman Jennifer, Bryan Stevenson spoke at Connecticut College last winter - and he was even more powerful in person than he is in print. He has dedicated his Jennifer, Bryan Stevenson spoke at Connecticut College last winter - and he was even more powerful in person than he is in print.
He has dedicated his entire life to this cause, and he doesn't appear to be one bit regretful of his sacrifice. Hallie Mittan I agree, Just Mercy is a must read. I couldn't believe the stories Bryan was sharing, Especially with 14 year old George Stinney who was 14 and senten I agree, Just Mercy is a must read. I couldn't believe the stories Bryan was sharing, Especially with 14 year old George Stinney who was 14 and sentenced to death just for being the last to see two young girls who were later murdered.
I think that that was the worst pard of the book Jun 11, Hana rated it it was amazing Shelves: This is a dark review of a very dark subject. Reader discretion is advised. Joe Sullivan was thirteen years old when he was arrested. Mentally disabled, neglected and abused, the product of a chaotic home, Joe could barely read at a first grade level and grew up mostly on the streets. On May 4, , with two older boys, he broke into an empty house in Pensacola, Florida.
Later, the elderly owner of the house was brutally raped. The woman never saw the man who raped her. When the Content Warning: When the two older boys were arrested one of them claimed that Joe had committed the rape—a charge he vehemently denied. Biological evidence collected from the victim was not presented at trial and was destroyed before it could be subjected to DNA testing. The older boys served short sentences in juvenile detention.
Joe was tried as an adult and sentenced to life imprisonment—in an adult prison—without possibility of parole. In prison, Joe was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted. He attempted suicide on multiple occasions. He developed multiple sclerosis, which doctors later concluded might have been triggered by trauma in prison.
Mr Bryan, if this is true, can you please write me back and come and get me? Among those filing amicus curiae briefs was a distinguished former U. And a different person. You're not who are when you're 16 or You're dumb, and you don't care and you think you are eternal. It broke my heart and changed the way I think about crime and punishment.
The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace. View all 14 comments. Feb 15, Trish rated it really liked it Shelves: There is definitely something amiss with my view of crime.
I read crime mysteries and police procedurals for pleasure, but reading about crime from the other side—innocence and guilt or suspects and law or the possibility that the criminal justice system can be wrong—makes me anxious and fretful. It seems like weakness. What I have come to see is that crime can occur on either side of a prosecution or conviction: Both are crimes, but they are not always pursued with the same diligence.
It is this travesty of justice that is so disturbing. If they killed someone, that was a big mistake, and those folks should also pay for their crime. The world has too many huge problems to worry about the life of some murderer.
One can make a mistake, one just has to pay for it. I trusted the system worked…that if the crime was really manslaughter or had some other mitigating circumstances, that the courts would battle it out. I was more concerned with justice for the victims of crime.
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Sometimes it is malice and intentional prejudice that such things happen in the United States, not just in the past, but now. In that case, if mistakes, accidents, or purposeful crimes are committed against the accused, we cannot use a death penalty, morally. We are hungry for the details, how it played out, if McMillan got compensation, if anyone was held responsible for wrongful imprisonment.
On my blog I post a minute TED talk by Bryan Stevenson that explains some of the things he's learned about wrongdoing since he began working with death-row inmates nearly thirty years ago. This TED talk comes when he is in his early fifties. This book was written in , two years later.
Stevenson is an unusual man. He says in that TED talk that he learned that people are more than their crimes. That may be true, but I am not as forgiving as he is. How he got to that safe place in his head begins to sound like Mother Teresa among the lepers…helping those with the least resources among us. But he has looked at the criminal justice system as closely as anyone so we have to ask: Can capital punishment ever be fair?
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 own humanity…. So there it is. He makes his point. The audio is read by the author, and published by Random House Audio. It is a good book to listen to, if one has time. It may be faster to read, but I found myself slowing down over some of his cases.
It is difficult for me to focus on some of the horrible lives and terrible choices people make. It makes me feel a little hopeless, too, that we could get to this place. I believe we must not unjustly imprison people, but I am not willing to go so far as to say every crime requires my absolution. Were trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don't get the legal help they need. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system for racial justice.
Ashley F. Miller
The oral arguments for the case Evan Miller v. Alabama that Stevenson won before the Supreme Court. Nov 08, Shannon rated it it was amazing Shelves: Before any reading material made it to my students at the state juvenile correctional facility, I first had to remove any questionable content. After finishing the story myself, I made sure it found its way to as many of my students as possible.
I brought up many of its major points in my history and government classes, hoping to spark discussion and bring light to recent changes in juvenile law. In chapters that range from heartbreaking and infuriating to uplifting and hopeful, he details his time working with prisoners on death row and juveniles facing endless life sentences. Though he does spend time outlining serious flaws in our current judicial system, for the majority of the book Stevenson shifts the discussion from political to personal.
Throughout Just Mercy, we meet people who are more than just a rap sheet, headline and sentencing. From his first face-to-face meeting with a death row inmate, Stevenson learns that the people he works with have histories, personalities, feelings and hopes that are often clouded by their crime. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up. I gave Herbert one last long hug, but I was thinking about what he said. I thought of all the evidence that the court had never reviewed about his childhood.
I was thinking about all of the trauma and difficulty that had followed him home from Vietnam. Just Mercy is a book more than capable of teaching us. Read more at rivercityreading. Sep 13, Laura rated it really liked it. You cannot defend condemned people without being broken. The above quotes sum it up. There's nothing else to say. We are all broken people. This is a great read to pair with the fictional book The Enchanted. This may need to be a reread. Wonder if Rene Denfeld would agree with Stevenson's assessment. I always intended to write a full review of this book but instead have decided to provide a link to a review written by a Goodreads friend.
I hope you will read this. This is a book which deserves to be read at a time when issues of justice are on every thinking person's mind. Justice must be served "justly" or our system simply will not work. Our system is not working. Stevenson gives a clearly written description of some of the most pressing problems. View all 12 comments.
He always is thorough and interesting. Thank you also for your comments. Hallie Mittan I completely agree, we can not keep letting innocent people be charged as guilty for crimes they didn't commit. We need to go through evidence and ali I completely agree, we can not keep letting innocent people be charged as guilty for crimes they didn't commit. We need to go through evidence and alibis multiple times and make sure that they are true before deeming someone is innocent or guilty with any crime.
Feb 05, Camie rated it it was amazing. A many award winning, nonfictional though sometimes you'll wish it were account of Bryan Stevenson, who as a young attorney, founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit practice which sole purpose is to defend the most maligned by the legal system those serving time on deathrow for crimes they didn't commit.
By being either poor, black, ill, damaged by childhood mistreatment, or most unfortunately just not well represented by those appointed to do so, these poor folks end up buried in the A many award winning, nonfictional though sometimes you'll wish it were account of Bryan Stevenson, who as a young attorney, founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit practice which sole purpose is to defend the most maligned by the legal system those serving time on deathrow for crimes they didn't commit.
By being either poor, black, ill, damaged by childhood mistreatment, or most unfortunately just not well represented by those appointed to do so, these poor folks end up buried in the legal justice system. This book is a real eye opener, especially the parts about children and mentally challenged adults who were tried as adults. The personal accounts given had me saying , "surely these kind of things don't happen nowadays" - except of course they do.
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This book was published in Though progress has been made by groups like EJI the politics and conspiracy encountered by vulnerable people continues. Hopefully there will always be decent people out there seeking justice and mercy for all!! I read Mercy before incidents such as the NFL kneeling campaign and other incidents put this subject " up front and center," and before another great book The Hate U Give one among many books more recently written about similar subjects. View all 7 comments. Aug 25, Darlene rated it it was amazing. A Story of Justice and Redemption , on display in my local public library and there was something about the title which implored me to pick it up.
I had never heard the name Bryan Stevenson before picking up this book and I wasn't aware of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice he had started to defend the most vulnerable and desperate in our society. Now, Bryan Stevenson is someone "Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment. Now, Bryan Stevenson is someone I will never forget. Although Bryan Stevenson did not write this book about himself , his story is compelling in that, on the surface, it seemed as if he discovered what was to be his life's work simply by chance. He was sent to Georgia's death row to deliver a message to a prisoner and he came away from the experience profoundly moved and changed.
Stevenson wrote this illuminating book to educate… to provide the truth about the effects of our society's willingness to engage in mass incarceration… the effects on the poorest and most vulnerable people. He begins in the s and demonstrates the trend the country has taken to engage in the harshest punishments which have moved us toward such widespread imprisonment.
He discusses how slogans such as "three strikes and you're out" have been utilized to demonstrate to the public how tough elected officials are willing to be on crime. The country even prosecutes children as adults.. The reality of this supposed toughness is that the prison population in the United States has increased from , people in the s to 2. Much of this mass incarceration is a direct result of the costly failure of the supposed 'war on drugs'… which incidentally, I have NEVER been able to understand.
I can't wrap my mind around why it makes sense to use so much of our precious and scarce resources to imprison people with substance abuse problems. To further explain and illustrate how the criminal justice system is set up and how it functions or doesn't function , Mr. Stevens writes about some of the many cases he has taken on over the years… cases which illustrate the injustice, cost… in dollars and the dignity and self-respect of the prisoners and also the terrible mistakes that have been made which have allowed people to be imprisoned, only to be found innocent of the crimes later.
To me, one of the most startling of the cases Mr. Stevens described was the case of Walter McMillan. McMillan lived in Monroe County in Alabama.. This meant that many death row inmates had no legal representation. McMillan had been sentenced to death for the murder of a young woman who had been killed in the dry cleaning establishment in which she was employed. Stevens received a letter from Mr. McMillan begging for his help. He was going to be executed and Mr. Stevens was his only hope. He insisted that he had not committed the murder. Stevens met with Mr. McMillan and decided to take on his case.
What he discovered was so unfair and so unjust that while reading, I couldn't decide if I should be angry or if I should weep. McMillan's story needs to be traced back to the beginning in order to fully comprehend the extent of the injustice. Walter McMillan was an African American man who ran his own business and he was respected and well-liked in his community.
He was also known as somewhat of a ladies' man and sadly for him, this seemed to put in motion all that would happen to him. One day, he caught the eye of a waitress in an establishment in which he was eating…. McMillan and soon they began an affair, even though Mr. As in every small town, people talked about this affair and people disapproved. As it happened, at about this time, a young white woman was murdered while working alone at a dry cleaner's one Saturday morning. The sheriff's department had no leads and no clues as to who had committed this murder.
To sum up the story, the sheriff's department and the district attorney's office made the decision that Walter McMillan was guilty of this murder and they set out to, what can only be described as fabrication every bit of so-called evidence they needed to convict him… despite the fact that Mr. McMillan had an alibi which could not be broken.
He had been at his own home that day working in his garage on his automobile and his home was filled with people from the church his family attended.. But the local elected officials needed to demonstrate to the community just how tough they were on crime, didn't they?
At the very least, they couldn't let themselves be seen as incompetent. I suppose the thinking was that Mr. McMillan could be 'broken' by waiting for his day in court if he was sitting with the prisoners on death row. The officials were hoping, I suppose, for Mr.
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McMillan to make a full confession. That would solve their 'little' problem of having no real evidence to link him to the crime. McMillan had already spent 7 years on death row for a crime he had not committed. Walter McMillan was eventually freed but of course, his life was never the same. Sadly, there would be no happy ending. Walter McMillan's story was just one of the outrageous stories Bryan Stevens shared throughout this shocking book. I was curious about just how the word 'mercy' is defined so I looked it up. The definition according to Webster's is: Do we want to be a society which imposes harsh, unfair and biased punishment on other human beings; or do we want to be a society which can demonstrate forgiveness, compassion… mercy?
There has to be a better way to carry out justice… justice needs to be free from bias, unreasonable fear and corruption. View all 24 comments. May 15, Clif Hostetler rated it liked it Shelves: This book exposes the rotten underbelly of the American judicial system, portraying it as abusive and unfair to poor people—particularly poor blacks.
This is a memoir by Bryan Stevenson that recounts his experiences providing legal representation for poor clients in the American South. Most of the cases mentioned are from the s and 90s beginning first in Georgia and later Alabama. Numerous legal cases are covered in the book with smaller cases scattered around the central story of the extende This book exposes the rotten underbelly of the American judicial system, portraying it as abusive and unfair to poor people—particularly poor blacks.
Numerous legal cases are covered in the book with smaller cases scattered around the central story of the extended fight to reverse the death sentence of Walter McMillian , a famous case that was covered by the TV show 60 minutes. Stevenson is the co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. At one point in the book where Stevenson is asked what the goals of the Equal Justice Initiative are he replies with the list of goals in the following excerpt. I believe it conveys the breadth and perhaps impossible magnitude of needs: I have a law project called the Equal justice Initiative, and we're trying to help people on death row.
We're trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors The book was published in so I presume the following excerpt provides a summary of their work up to that point. The number of death row prisoners in Alabama for whom we'd won relief reached one hundred. We had created a new community of formerly condemned prisoners in Alabama who had been illegally convicted or sentenced to death row. Starting in , we had eighteen months with no executions in Alabama. Continued litigation about lethal injection protocols and other questions about the reliability of the death penalty slowed the execution rate in Alabama dramatically.
In , Alabama recorded the lowest number of new death sentences since the resumption of capital punishment in the mids. These were very hopeful developments. Bryan Stevenson initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which honors the names of each of the over 4, African Americans lynched in the twelve states of the South from to Nov 28, Taryn Pierson rated it it was amazing Shelves: On a personal note: I read this a while ago, and you guys, I can't get it out of my head.
I've been reading lighter books lately because the busy holiday season doesn't leave me much bandwidth to wrestle with heavy topics, and if you're in that boat too, I get it. But make a note to yourself to find a copy of Just Mercy once January rolls around and you're ready to engage with the world again. This book made me furious. Mostly at my own naivete and head-in-the-sand, privileged optimism. I had no On a personal note: I had no idea how corrupt our legal system can be and how easily it is manipulated to exploit minorities and the poor.
This white suburban middle-class bubble, it has thick walls. Bryan Stevenson is an attorney who founded a non-profit law firm in Alabama with the goal of reducing sentences or exonerating people condemned to death row. I hadn't thought much about the death penalty since reading Dead Man Walking as a high schooler, but damned if I can't stop thinking about it now. I hadn't ever felt comfortable with the idea, and if pressed, I'd have probably said I was against it, but now that I've read Just Mercy, I'm absolutely convinced.
I could try to summarize some of Stevenson's best points here, but I'd never be able to do him justice. He's so eloquent and intelligent, you really owe it to yourself to read the book. It's amazing to me that Stevenson, as someone who has dedicated his life to representing people whose lives have been ruined or ended by unjust punishments, was able to write this book in such a calm, measured, gracious tone.
Even setting aside everything his clients have been through, Stevenson has, as a black man, found himself on the receiving end of infuriating harassment and prejudice. Still, despite all that, every day he somehow finds the energy to go fight for justice for his clients. To have hope in the face of all that he has seen must require great faith—in God, in his moral code, in the power within each person to choose good?
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I'm not sure exactly where Stevenson's faith springs from, but it inspired me, even as his stories made me want to throw in the towel on his behalf. How do you fix a system this broken, full of broken people on both sides of the bars? The best thing about Just Mercy is its underlying message of hope. That fighting on the side of good matters, even if good doesn't win them all. I have to admit to some cynicism about that. But I desperately want to believe it, and people like Bryan Stevenson help me find courage to keep showing up and doing the work.
More book recommendations by me at www. Absolutely powerful, horrific and heartbreaking! I had to pause several times while reading this book to allow my mind to absorb the overwhelming context. The author does a fantastic job giving the reader the history of racial politics of the South and how it has transcended through time. God Bless Bryan Stevenson, what an amazing indiv Absolutely powerful, horrific and heartbreaking! God Bless Bryan Stevenson, what an amazing individual! We need more mercy. We need more justice. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear.
You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us. Mar 06, Lewis Weinstein rated it it was amazing Shelves: How do they do this? They make up evidence. They create and intimidate witnesses by threats and bribes. They hide exculpatory evidence they are required by law to give to the defense attorney. These public officials are a disgrace to American law enforcement and they are almost never punished for their behavior, even when those they wrongly JUST MERCY is a ringing denunciation of the way prosecutors, police officers and judges conspire to get convictions without having the evidence.
These public officials are a disgrace to American law enforcement and they are almost never punished for their behavior, even when those they wrongly sent to prison are released 10, 20 or more years later, their lives ruined. Bryan Stevenson writes as well as the top mystery novelists, except his stories are true. The book presents examples of each of these kinds of cases. Stevenson's cases take place in the south, but the problems he describes are found everywhere in America. Meeting these people will make you cry. It could happen to you.
I have studied and written about these matters in my novel A Good Conviction. John Grisham's Rogue Lawyer covers much of the same territory. Our fiction is based on real cases, but Bryan Stevenson gives it to you straight, from real life, recent cases, still happening. You really sound like a whiner re: He wants the Nicholl to be an open process, not one of secrecy and questions.
Good to know for sure though. You just happened to hit on a subject I have a lot of personal experience with. Ashley — We visited online about two years past. I have just had a novel published by a subsidiary of Amazon. I wrote the novel to challenge an ineffective addiction treatment community — which I believe to be mere narrative science. State sponsored narrative science in the criminal justice system serves only to increase our prison population. Four basic models are presented — and I suspect you and I would agree on the most effective. I would send you a copy for free, or you can check it out here: Thanks for putting together all the info on Parah Palin and Gabrielle Giffords ….
I found your post looking for the same info…could of guessed a fellow filmmaker would put it together …great blog.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
I do have a reality series I am trying to get sold and would appreciate any help you could offer. I just started a blog critiquing OWS from a left-moderate view and you are the second one I am adding to my blog roll. I hope I can be as forthright and articulate as you! Noting to see on this blog except the usual hackneyed nutbar leftwing drivel, presented in the usual smug manner.
I wasted about forty minutes snooping around.
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Erica — your time was not wasted. Ashley asks credible and relevant questions about the nature of humanity. The failure to ask the question is to be hackneyed drivel. Unfollow cisco to stop getting updates on your eBay Feed. You'll receive email and Feed alerts when new items arrive. Turn off email alerts. Skip to main content.
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