This book is a based on the real life experiences of Bryan Stevenson as he worked as a lawyer in the southern states. Bryan was young when he founded his own non profit organization, the Equal Justice Initiative to help the most desperate people in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned and children. The main storyline of the book focuses on one of Bryan’s first cases after college, Walter McMillian. McMillian was wrongly convicted of a brutal murder and it was because of the unfair trial that he received. As someone who was interested in being a lawyer at one point in time, I found Bryan's story to be very riveting. My initial thoughts before starting to read this book was that the story would be interesting but told in a boring way, but I was completely blown …show more content…
I knew that this was an issue that we have in our country, but just recently have I really started to understand real problem behind black men being institutionalized by the law. There was a clear difference of how people were treated in the McMillan case because of the story of Ralph Myer’s. Even though Myer’s story placed him at the scene of the crime, despite the fact that his story was fake, when it came to sentencing Walter received a harsher punishment. By looking at the cases of death row trials, you see that there is a disadvantage for black men that are on trial for death row. Stevenson says that “nearly everyone on death row had been tried by an all-white or nearly all-white jury” (Stevenson 60), this happening in some of the most racists states in America that were still lynching black men. The white people in these states were stigmatizing black people to the point that they were willing to throw a man’s life away because of the color of his skin rather than finding the true