BOOKS: ​“Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, has writ­ten a new book, Just Mercy, about his expe­ri­ences defend­ing the poor and the wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed through­out the south. It includes the sto­ry of one of Stevenson’s first cas­es as a young lawyer, that of Walter McMillian, who was even­tu­al­ly exon­er­at­ed and freed from death row. McMillian, a black man, had been con­vict­ed of the mur­der of a white woman in Monroeville, Alabama. His tri­al last­ed just a day and a half, pros­e­cu­tors with­held excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence, and the judge imposed a death sen­tence over the jury’s rec­om­men­da­tion for life. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of the book, ​“Bryan Stevenson is America’s young Nelson Mandela, a bril­liant lawyer fight­ing with courage and con­vic­tion to guar­an­tee jus­tice for all. Just Mercy should be read by peo­ple of con­science in every civ­i­lized coun­try in the world to dis­cov­er what hap­pens when revenge and ret­ri­bu­tion replace jus­tice and mer­cy. It is as grip­ping to read as any legal thriller, and what hangs in the bal­ance is noth­ing less than the soul of a great nation.”

(B. Stevenson, ​“Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” (Spiegel & Grau, October, 2014); DPIC post­ed Sept. 30, 2014). See Books and Representation. See EJI’s sched­ule of Stevenson’s speak­ing events about the book.