Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (2014)
Reading Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, about his work with the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal non-profit representing death row inmates based in Montgomery, Alabama, one is struck by the notion that no one is easier to forget than a prisoner. If we think about the incarcerated at all, it is disturbingly easy to assume that they deserve to be where they are. But this assumption is based on a tacit faith that the US criminal justice system is in fact just, or mostly so, and Stevenson is here to show us, in dramatic detail, some of the many ways in which it is not simply unjust, but evil.
The evil that Bryan Stevenson confronts is equal parts bigotry, carelessness, and a smug confidence that jailing someone erases them and the crime they supposedly committed from public memory. The men and women he represents are among the most vulnerable and easily forgotten in our criminal justice system, which is to say in our society: death row inmates, lifers serving sentences meted out when they were children, prisoners who are mentally ill or underdeveloped. Stevenson and his colleagues spend years of long days digging into their stories and reviewing and re-arguing their cases, work that has taken EJI to the Supreme Court five times. The weight of systemic injustice and personal loss in these cases makes Just Mercy a hard read, but in the country that has the world's highest incarceration rate; that now holds in prison, probation, or parole more black men than it enslaved in 1850; that spends much, much more on incarcerating its citizens than it does on educating them, it also feels like a deeply necessary one.
Stevenson anchors his book in the stories of the people he represents. We get to know at least a dozen quite well, but the central case is that of Walter “Johnny D” McMillian, an African-American man on death row for the murder of Ronda Morrison, a young white woman. The only thing McMillian is guilty of is not actually a crime – having an extra-marital affair with a different white woman, Karen Kelly – and the transparently absurd case, pushed by the state of Alabama, that McMillian is Morrison’s killer would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. The frustration you feel as Stevenson faces roadblock after tedious roadblock serves as an appropriate foundation for a book about a system that is quite simply insane.
Unsurprisingly, the particular insanity that put McMillian on death row is the same insanity that has helped drive generations of bigotry, particularly but not exclusively in the South: white fear of interracial sex and marriage, for which supporters of slavery coined the technical-sounding term “miscegenation” in the 1860s. “‘Racial integrity’ laws,” Stevenson says,
were part of a [post-Reconstruction] plan to replicate slavery’s racial hierarchy and reestablish the subordination of African Americans. Having criminalized interracial sex and marriage, states throughout the South would use the laws to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Forbidding sex between white women and black men became an intense preoccupation throughout the South.
Stevenson calls upon an 1882 Alabama Supreme Court decision upholding the conviction of a black man and white woman in which the judges wrote that the result of such a union would be “the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound policy affecting the highest interests of society and government.” Laws affirming this view were not renounced by the US Supreme Court until 1967, and in 1986, when Walter McMillian and Karen Kelly had their fling, the Alabama state constitution still forbade “any law to authorise or legalise any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendant of a Negro.”
The great-grandson of slaves, Stevenson grew up poor in segregated rural Delaware and worked his way to Harvard. After a summer internship in Georgia’s Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, in which he became convinced that “capital punishment means ‘them without the capital get the punishment,’” he devoted his life to defending prisoners on death row in the South, eventually starting EJI in Alabama. His work with Walter McMillian brought him national attention, including a story on 60 Minutes. Viewers were dumbfounded by the flimsy evidence against this man on death row – rightly so, as you will see if you read the book.
As much sympathy as Stevenson draws from McMillian’s case, Walter is still, for all his troubles, a capable and accomplished man (before his conviction, he ran his own pulpwood business that supplied Alabama’s large paper manufacturing plants). Many of Stevenson’s clients, however, are physically or mentally disabled or were too young to have embarked on any kind of life of their own before their arrests. Trina Garnett was the witness and victim of profoundly disturbing physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father, an alcoholic and failed boxer. Homeless at the age of fourteen, Trina accidentally burned down the house of two boys she and a friend were sneaking in to see in the middle of the night, killing the boys. She was convicted of second-degree murder and given a life sentence in Pennsylvania, which forbids judges from considering factors like age, abuse, and poverty. Ian Manuel was sentenced to life at the age of thirteen for shooting a woman in the face in the course of a robbery in Florida. To protect him from sexual assault in the adult prison where he serves his time, the guards kept Ian in solitary confinement. When she learned of his situation, the woman whom Ian had shot petitioned the court for a reduced sentence, but the court ignored her request. Trina, Ian, and the many others Stevenson represents were not just young when they committed their crimes, they were also desperately impoverished and had already endured far more than most Americans twice their age.
Why are we so quick to imprison poor people? A history of segregation and fear are, of course, only part of the answer. Another is what can only be described as the prison industrial complex – an outsized incarceration business that, like any other business, seeks growth at all costs and lobbies hard to ensure it. In a January 2012 New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik made this point forcefully, quoting from a 2005 internal report by the nation’s largest for-profit “correctional” institution, the Corrections Corporation of America, showing the insanity of what we have created:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities…. [A]ny changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
The intersection of a growth-based morality, the public sector’s willingness to buy into it, and a cozy connection between big prison and outdated, unjust laws helps to account for the more than tenfold increase in state and federal spending on prisons since 1980 – from $6.9 billion to nearly $80 billion. Stevenson points out that “[s]tate governments have been forced to shift funds from public services, education, health, and welfare to pay for incarceration, and they now face unprecedented economic crises as a result.”
A current example can be found in Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana, the "prison capital" of the world (it “imprisons more people per capita than any other state or country on earth”). A 2012 report by the VERA Institute for Justice, in partnership with the Pew Center on the States, found that in FY 2010 Louisiana spent just under $700 million on its prison system. In 2016 it faces a budget shortfall of $1.6 billion, which Jindal will likely plug with a $1 billion cut to state health care and further cuts to higher education. The New York Times reported in February that in Louisiana “there are a thousand fewer full-time college faculty members on the state payroll [compared to 2008], and next year Louisiana State University, the state’s flagship institution, is facing a potential 40 percent cut in its operating budget.” Jindal recently announced that he will run for president.
The subtitle of Stevenson’s book is “A Story of Justice and Redemption,” and it does contain hopeful notes. EJI keeps innocent people from being killed by the state, relieves others of life sentences, and in some cases, such as those argued before the Supreme Court, effects long-term change with new precedent and changes to case law. Stevenson does at times, it must be said, tend toward unapologetic sentimentality, as in his description in the book’s introduction of a death row inmate’s singing as a form of resistance to the prison’s guards. My first worry on encountering this passage, and so early in the book, was that Stevenson would undercut the seriousness of his message with too much pathos, but I later came to see these moments as a worthwhile challenge to the reader. I was in part resistant because they seemed to romanticize men who had in some instances done genuinely horrible things. Stevenson, however, wants to radically change the way we see prisoners, especially those on death row, by humanizing them in ways we are not accustomed to. “[T]he death penalty,” he says, “is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?”
Just Mercy is a powerful argument that we in fact do not deserve to kill, because we have created a system whose function, in the simplest terms, is to punish the poor. Our current discourse on American justice shows that this system has many faces, causes, and effects. In Albuquerque, then Ferguson, then Baltimore, we’ve seen citizens take control of public spaces to protest the wing of the criminal justice machine that most directly threatens them – the police – as it has proven by killing homeless people (Albuquerque) or young, unarmed black men (Ferguson and Baltimore). A majority of these protestors’ aims are essentially similar to Stevenson’s: they urgently call on us look at what we have, by design, forgotten. They are telling us that it is no longer an option to put someone in a cell, or a neighborhood, or a zip code, for the purpose of forgetting them. And we must prove our understanding not just by getting rid of a few violent cops, but by changing the machine that encourages violence. “The opposite of poverty is not wealth,” says Stevenson. “The opposite of poverty is justice.”
The sad relevance of Just Mercy is everywhere, even in the last several days. On July 9th, an African-American woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over in Waller County, Texas, just south of Houston, for failing to signal before a lane change. Video of the traffic stop shows officers forcing her to the ground in a scene that recalls the abusive treatment in 2014 of Arizona State University professor Ersula Ore. On July 13th, Bland was found dead in her Waller County jail cell. County police insist she committed suicide, but Bland was by all accounts a strong, proud, and accomplished woman, moving to Texas for a new job at Prarie View A&M, her alma mater. She had every reason to live. On the same day Bland was pronounced dead, President Obama commuted the sentences of 46 non-violent drug offenders, and on the 16th he became the first president to visit a federal prison, acknowledging in both instances the profound injustice of US incarceration practices.
Bryan Stevenson’s advocacy, writing, and public statements are powerful and necessary elements of a national dialogue on race and criminal justice that is gaining momentum. Some of his recent contributions include this interview, and this Equal Justice Initiative video, “Slavery to Mass Incarceration.” Both, like Just Mercy, are highly compelling and informative.