{"id":25,"date":"2016-10-31T14:37:49","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T18:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nlg.org\/nlg-review\/?post_type=article&p=25"},"modified":"2016-10-31T15:30:47","modified_gmt":"2016-10-31T19:30:47","slug":"book-review-just-mercy-a-story-of-justice-and-redemption-by-bryan-stevenson","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.nlg.org\/nlg-review\/article\/book-review-just-mercy-a-story-of-justice-and-redemption-by-bryan-stevenson\/","title":{"rendered":"BOOK REVIEW – Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption<\/em>, New York, Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, 2014, 336pp. Paperback 2015<\/h3>\n

Reviewed By Alan W. Clarke<\/a><\/h3>\n

Your Honor \u2026 It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for \u00a0 murder and send him to death row for something he didn\u2019t do and much too \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence. We have serious \u00a0 prob\u00adlems and important work that must be done \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Bryan Stevenson, in Walter McMillan\u2019s case.1<\/p>\n

It is no longer reasonably debatable that our inefficient, expensive, broken, racist, criminal justice bureaucracy wrongfully condemns and executes the wholly innocent.\u00a0 That in itself marks an astonishing reordering of opinion since the 1980s when nearly 8 people in 10 supported the death penalty2 and a gubernatorial candidate in Alabama ran for office vowing to \u201cfry them until their eyeballs pop out.\u201d3 Riddled with race and class biases, the U.S. prison\u2013industrial complex also ruins the lives of millions more\u2014mostly poor, despised and discriminated\u2013against minorities, generating the second highest imprisonment rate in the world, second only to the Seychelles4 and by far the largest total prison population of any nation on earth, roundly beating the far more populous China for this dubious distinction.5<\/p>\n

Since 1973 courts have been forced, over vigorous and sometimes vicious opposition from prosecutors and police, to free 156 patently innocent victims of America\u2019s experiment with capital punishment.6\u00a0 While we can never know precisely how many innocent people have been killed by the state, scholars identify 13 who were executed despite probable innocence.\u00a0 In the case of Carlos DeLuna, evidence that Texas killed\u2014perhaps \u201cjudicially murdered\u201d would be a better phrase\u2014an innocent man approaches certainty.7 Beyond capital punishment, and in our name, the carceral complex deploys a variety of formally neutral, seemingly facilitative and supposedly disinterested, but in practice racist and classist, mechanisms to ensure quick, inexpensive, but fallible convictions with cruelly long imprisonment for those without money or resources.\u00a0 Justitia<\/em> may wear a blindfold but she unerringly detects race and class.<\/p>\n

Enter into this Stygian morass a very bright, determined, idealistic, nearly broke, and at first splendidly na\u00efve, Harvard trained lawyer, Bryan Stevenson.\u00a0 Just Mercy<\/em> shines the clearest spotlight yet on our Jim Crow-style judicial pipeline to prison or death. What did he do? His conversation with civil rights icon Rosa Parks summarizes his project nicely:<\/p>\n

Ms. Parks turned to me sweetly and asked, \u2018now, Bryan tell me who you are and what you\u2019re doing.\u2019 \u2026<\/p>\n

\u2018Yes, ma\u2019am. Well, I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we\u2019re trying to help people on death row. We\u2019re trying to stop the death penalty actually. We\u2019re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who\u2019ve been wrongfully convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We\u2019re trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don\u2019t get the legal help they need. We\u2019re trying to help children in adult jails and prisons. We\u2019re trying to do something about poverty and the hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system. We\u2019re trying to educate people to confront abuse of power by\u00a0 police and prosecutors . . . .\u2019<\/p>\n

Ms. Parks leaned back, smiling. \u2018Ooooh, honey, all that\u2019s going to make you tired, tired, tired.\u20198<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Walter McMillian\u2019s wrongful conviction predicated on perjured testimony, and a law enforcement cover-up, arguably constitutes Bryan Stevenson\u2019s most celebrated case. It exposed nearly everything wrong with our criminal injustice system\u2014starting with a racist Alabama judge with the improbably appropriate name, Robert E. Lee Key, Jr.\u2014a man who, unlike his namesake, never stopped fighting the civil war.\u00a0 Key\u2019s racism reeked from his first tele\u00adphone conversation with Stevenson,\u00a0 \u201cThis is Judge Key, and you don\u2019t want to have anything to do with this McMillian case. No one really understands how depraved this situation truly is, including me, but I know it\u2019s ugly. These men might even be Dixie Mafia.\u201d9<\/p>\n

And, what was McMillian\u2019s sin? A married, successful black man, he outraged the white community by dating a white woman.<\/p>\n

Mr. McMillian, \u2026 did not have a history of violence, but he was well known in town for something else. Mr. McMillian, \u2026 was dating a white woman. \u2026 And \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 one of his sons had married a white woman. Roots of suspicion.10<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

McMillian was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death in Monro\u00adeville, Alabama, the natal county of favorite daughter Harper Lee.\u00a0 Her 1960 classic To Kill a Mockingbird <\/em>eerily foreshadows this case. The film version of Lee\u2019s novel was shot in Monroeville and Gregory Peck, as defense lawyer Atticus Finch, argued his fictional case in the old county courthouse. Brock Peters played the part of Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly charged with and convicted of raping a white woman.\u00a0 Adding to the irony, the community proudly stages a yearly production of the story with the Mockingbird Players.<\/em>11\u00a0 The book, the film, the annually staged play, and a museum commemorat\u00ading the trial, are the town\u2019s main tourist attractions\u00a0 thus intertwining self-congratulatory civic vainglory with racism and dollops of rancid hypocrisy. 12<\/p>\n

For Walter McMillian, as for the fictional Tom Robinson, Monroeville seethed with racism. \u201cThe intense rage of the arresting officers and the rac\u00adist taunts and threats from uniformed police officers who did not know him were shocking.\u201d13 McMillian\u2019s arresting officer unleashed such a torrent of invective that all Walter heard was \u201c\u2018[n]igger this,\u2019 \u2018nigger that,\u2019 followed by insults and threats of lynching.\u201d 14<\/p>\n

That law enforcement somehow housed him on death row even before he was tried, much less convicted, speaks volumes about the cozy relationship between police, prosecutor and judge. Stevenson and the reader are left per\u00adplexed. How did they manage to put a presumptively innocent man onto death row before trial, verdict, sentence, or even the ordinary prison processes?15<\/p>\n

One can only imagine McMillian\u2019s horror at his precipitate and confused change in circumstances, one day innocent and free, and then in a bewilder\u00ading instant transformed into an innocent man on death row. Sinking into deep despair, 16<\/p>\n

[h]is body reacted to the shock of the situation. A lifelong smoker, Walter \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 tried to smoke to calm his nerves, but at Holman [the prison housing Alabama\u2019s death row] he found the experience of smoking nauseating and quit immediately. For days he couldn\u2019t taste anything he ate. He couldn\u2019t orient or calm himself. When he woke each morning, he would feel normal for a few minutes and then sink into terror upon remembering where he was. Prison officials had shaved his head and all the hair from his face. Looking into a mirror he didn\u2019t recognize himself. 17<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is no ordinary case of the wrongful conviction of a black man on death row (the fact that such cases remain all too ordinary is a penetrating indictment of our criminal justice system). It was not even a typical case of wrongful conviction resisted at every level notwithstanding clear evidence of actual innocence, although this too occurs often enough as defensive pros\u00adecutors invent ever-nuttier hypotheses of guilt thus compounding their initial error.\u00a0 Far worse than mere incompetence tinged with racism, this capital case exposed the downright framing of an innocent black man, using perjured testimony, for having the audacity to date a white woman.<\/p>\n

It is also a tale of perseverance. One follows in awe as Stevenson overcomes one obstacle after another in his improbable untangling of the web of deceit thrown up by law enforcement officers, the prosecutor and judge. Indeed, this is the part that any death penalty post-conviction lawyer will appreciate.\u00a0 Few lawyers harbor the talent, intellect and diligence to, with meager resources, untangle such a deceitful web as the one that ensnared Walter McMillian. This leads to a regrettable conclusion. He was lucky in two respects. First, he had one of the most effective and caring lawyers imaginable.\u00a0 How many others languish in our prisons who, if they have a lawyer at all, have one who isn\u2019t up to such a daunting task?. Second, he had the good fortune, if good fortune it can be called, to draw a foolish judge, who over-rode the jury\u2019s recommendation and sentenced him to death, thus inviting more attention to his case. \u201cIf the jury\u2019s sentence of life in prison without parole had been left in place, Mr. McMillian might have been another forgotten black inmate in an Alabama prison.\u201d 18<\/p>\n

While working on multiple death row cases, Bryan Stevenson somehow found time to tackle the even more widespread problem of children as young as thirteen or fourteen years old increasingly sentenced in adult courts to life without the possibility of parole. In 2010, as a result of Stevenson\u2019s advocacy, the Supreme Court invalidated \u201cLife imprisonment without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of non-homicide crimes\u201d holding such to be \u201ccruel and unusual punishment and constitutionally impermissible.\u201d19\u00a0 Then in 2012, also as a result of his efforts, the Supreme Court held that, even in cases of homicide, life without the possibility of parole is unconstitutional.20\u00a0 These two cases likely had a broader impact in the numbers of people affected than any other case he had handled.<\/p>\n

For most lawyers, these achievements alone would mark a successful career in social justice advocacy.\u00a0 Stevenson, always pressed for time, nonetheless also turned his attention to wrongfully convicted \u201cbad moms\u201d whose children were stillborn, or suffered an unexplained death, or who were \u201ccriminally prosecuted and sent to prison for decades if there was any evidence that they had used drugs at any point during the pregnancy.\u201d 21<\/p>\n

In the process, he exposed an incompetent forensic pathologist \u201cwith a his\u00adtory of prematurely and incorrectly declaring deaths to be homicides without adequate supporting evidence.\u201d 22\u00a0 His work also helped start a movement to assist the \u201cthousands of women\u2014particularly poor women in difficult circumstances\u2014whose children die unexpectedly\u201d countering the wrongful \u201ccriminalization \u2026 and the persecution of poor women\u00a0 whose children die.\u201d 23\u00a0 In one case, the \u201cdiscredited pathologist left Alabama but continues to serve as a practicing medical examiner in Texas.\u201d 24<\/p>\n

Stevenson has not only fought racism; he has experienced it. Late one night, exhausted from a hectic day, and while sitting for a few minutes in his car outside his apartment, listening to Sly and the Family Stone on the radio, a police SWAT team accosted him. Systematically humiliated and illegally searched before a growing crowd, he could hear people \u201ctalking about all the burglaries in the neighborhood. . . . There was a particularly vocal older white woman who loudly demanded that I be questioned about items she was missing.\u201d 25<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2019Ask him about my radio and my vacuum cleaner!\u2019 Another lady asked about her cat who had been absent for three days.\u201d26 Repeated complaints to the Atlanta Police Department\u2019s administrative review process yielded the consistent response that the police had done no wrong. With a crushing casel\u00adoad, and like so many young black men who have been harassed and stopped and illegally searched, Stevenson eventually dropped the matter.\u00a0 However, unlike those similarly situated young black men, Stevenson did get one last minor victory. Just Mercy<\/em> exposes all the racism, bigotry and sheer incompe\u00adtence of Atlanta\u2019s police. It also reveals a callous administrative indifference all the way up the chain of command.\u00a0 Just Mercy<\/em> shines a penetrating light on entrenched racism in our police and judicial systems. Given Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and a host of recent incidents, this exposure of indecent, systemic failure is essential reading.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/h3>\n

On September 11, 2013, after struggling for years with disabilities and dementia, Walter McMillan died. At his funeral Bryan Stevenson told the congregation at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church:<\/p>\n

Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent . . . . Walter\u2019s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, ir\u00adrational, and dangerous . . . . mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us . . . . Walter\u2019s case had taught me that the death penalty 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?<\/em>27<\/p>\n

Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls Bryan Stevenson \u201cAmerica\u2019s young Nelson Mandela.\u201d Indeed.<\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

NOTES<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, (2014) at 225.<\/li>\n
  2. http:\/\/deathpenaltyinfo.org\/national-polls-and-studies<\/li>\n
  3. Alan W. Clarke, Procedural Labyrinths and the Injustice of Death: A Critique of Death Penalty Habeas Corpus (Part Two)<\/em>, 30 U. Rich. L. Rev. 303, 355 (1996).<\/li>\n
  4. World Prison Brief, Institute for Criminal Policy Research, available at<\/em> http:\/\/www.pris\u00adonstudies.org\/highest-to-lowest\/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All<\/li>\n
  5. Id<\/em>. http:\/\/www.prisonstudies.org\/highest-to-lowest\/prison-population-total?field_re\u00adgion_taxonomy_tid=All<\/li>\n
  6. Death Penalty Information Center, Innocence and the Death Penalty (April 18, 2016) http:\/\/www.deathpenaltyinfo.org\/innocence-and-death-penalty.<\/li>\n
  7. Robert Weisburg, Executing Justice: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution by James Liebman & the Columbia DeLuna Project<\/em>, 93 Tex. L. Rev. 1179 (2014).<\/li>\n
  8. Stevenson, supra<\/em> note 1 at 293.<\/li>\n
  9. Id.<\/em><\/li>\n
  10. Peter Applebome, Alabama Releases Man Held on Death Row for Six Years<\/em>, N.Y. Times, Mar. 3, 1993, available at<\/em> http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1993\/03\/03\/us\/alabama-releases-man-held-on-death-row-for-six-years.html.<\/li>\n
  11. Jennifer Crossley Howard & Serge F. Kovaleski, \u2018Mockingbird\u2019 Reopens in Alabama, <\/em>11. Jennifer Crossley Howard & Serge F. Kovaleski, \u2018Mockingbird\u2019 Reopens in Alabama, and Drama Plays Out, <\/em>N.Y, Times, April 17, 2016, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/04\/18\/books\/a-mockingbird-reopens-in-alabama-and-drama-plays-out.html?_r=0.<\/li>\n
  12. Peter Applebome, supra<\/em> note 10, writes,<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    .\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mr. McMillian\u2019s case, which was given national attention last fall on the CBS News program \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d played out in Monroeville, Ala., best known as the home of the Harper Lee, whose \u201cTo Kill a Mockingbird,\u201d told a painful story of race and justice in the small-town Jim Crow South. To many of his defenders, Mr. McMillian\u2019s conviction for the killing seemed like an updated version of the book, in which a black man was accused of raping a white woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Stevenson, supra<\/em> note 1, at 55.<\/li>\n
    2. Id. at 50.<\/em><\/li>\n
    3. Stevenson writes, \u201cIt\u2019s unclear how Tate was able to persuade Holman\u2019s warden to house two pretrial detainees on death row, although Tate knew people at the prison from his days as a probation officer.\u201d Id.<\/em> at 53.<\/li>\n
    4. Id.<\/em><\/li>\n
    5. Id.<\/em> at 55\u201356.<\/li>\n
    6. Id.<\/em><\/li>\n
    7. Stevenson, supra<\/em> note 1, at 295.<\/li>\n
    8. Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. ___ ; 132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012) held that life imprisonment for juveniles without the possibility of parole was unconstitutional. Bryan Stevenson argued the case for the juveniles. Stevenson, supra<\/em> note 1, at 295-96.<\/li>\n
    9. Stevenson, supra<\/em> note 1, at 234.<\/li>\n
    10. Id.<\/em> at 230.<\/li>\n
    11. Id.<\/em>. at 233.<\/li>\n
    12. Id.<\/em><\/li>\n
    13. Id.<\/em> at 41.<\/li>\n
    14. Id.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      ______________________<\/p>\n

      <\/a>Alan W. Clarke<\/strong> is a professor of Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah and a contributing editor to National Lawyers Guild Review<\/em>. His most recent book is Rendition to Torture,<\/em> published by Rutgers University Press in 2012.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, New York, Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, 2014, 336pp. Paperback 2015 Reviewed By Alan W. Clarke Your Honor \u2026 It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for \u00a0 murder and send him to death row for something he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"issuem_issue":[3],"class_list":["post-25","article","type-article","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","issuem_issue-nlgr-73-1-spring-2016","post"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t