An Humble Review
[Disclaimer: I am neither a literary critic nor a film critic, but I read voraciously and just saw Warner Bros. Entertainment's 2019 film adaptation of Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy. The book and the movie are timely in view of the national, indeed global, paroxysm that has been belatedly occasioned by the vicious murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others. For this reason, I thought I'd post a review of Stevenson's book that I wrote a month or so ago for Southwestern University's Great Summer Reading 2020, lightly adapted for context.]
Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York : Spiegel & Grau, 2014) is the best nonfiction leisure read I’ve had in years – a big-hearted and inspiring book. It's about the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a Montgomery (Alabama)-based nonprofit devoted to criminal-justice reform, especially for wrongly convicted, inadequately represented, and unjustly sentenced victims of the U.S. culture of mass incarceration. The book’s main narrative is that of Walter McMillan, an African American man who was sentenced to die in prison for a crime that included no evidence against him, and that he could not have committed because he was at a fish fry with dozens of witnesses, until EJI finally won his exoneration after twenty-five years. This narrative is interwoven with other groups of case-studies organized around themes of justice for mentally challenged individuals unconstitutionally tried and sentenced, justice for children tried and sentenced as adults, and justice for women wrongly accused of infanticide and unjustly sentenced because law enforcement responded to media pressure rather than the pursuit of convicting the actual offenders. Stevenson comments on these narratives with infinite compassion and wisdom:
“Maybe if we [acknowledged our weaknesses and fears] we . . . would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized” (291);
“fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. . . .
mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities [because of] our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. . . .
[M]ercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given” (313-14).
This is a book that teaches us through the wisdom and insights into redemption that Stevenson has gained from his work on behalf of these broken and abused souls. I recommend it highly.
The movie focuses on only one of the several main threads in the book and is limited in this respect. That said, I recommend the movie enthusiastically: it is powerful, beautifully acted and directed, and compelling.
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