January 23

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)
By Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson was fresh out of Harvard Law School, following up work he'd done as a summer intern to defend death row inmates in Atlanta.  He discovers that more and more inmates have been wrongly convicted, based on fabricated "evidence" or have been tried as children for non-capital crimes, but face a life in prison without parole.  Most notable is Walter McMillan, convicted of killing a young white woman in an Alabama dry cleaning establishment.  McMillan's story is woven throughout this book; we learn that he was at a fish fry in his own front yard with a dozen witnesses at the time of the crime; we meet Ralph Myers, the state's solitary witness who testifies to an unbelievable story implicating Walter (on the orders of Alabama law officials who wanted closure to the crime), we meet another man who was forced to lie about seeing Walter's truck at the scene of the crime to shore up Myers' testimony.  We meet the judges who are complicit in Walter's wrongful conviction.  Finally, McMillan's plight catches the interest of Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes"; he interviews Walter, Myers, Judge Chapman, and Bryan Stevenson on a segment that raises considerable national interest.  Shortly afterwards, the judge agrees to examine evidence for a 2nd trial, and Walter is acquitted after 6 years in prison on a false charge.

Besides Walter, Stevenson writes of Joe, a mentally-challenged 13-year-old falsely charge of rape, who has been in prison, with no chance of parole, for 18 years by the time he meets Bryan.  He writes of a mother of six, falsely charged by a neighbor of killing her baby, who had actually died of natural causes.  Brian works to free all these individuals who are wrongly convicted.  As his caseload increases, he founds the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, AL to raise support to defend the growing number of incarcerated individuals who have no legal representation.  (At the time of the book's publication, the EJI had a staff of ~40 lawyers.)

Most of Stevenson's clients are poor; many are black.  Almost all have been victims of police or prosecutorial misconduct, and many are incarcerated for crimes as minor as writing bad checks. As with Walter McMillan's case, Stevenson had to navigate through the maze of prejudice, injustice, inflexible sentencing laws, and the continued practice of incarcerating many juveniles, minorities, and mentally ill people in a frenzy of mass incarceration that thwarts justice and inhumanely punishes the poor and disadvantaged.  Our criminal justice system is sorely in need of reform, and advocates like Bryan Stevenson are its best hope.  

Following up, a brief interview with Bryan Stevenson appears in last Sunday's NY Times Magazine.