Just Mercy: A Story Of Justice And Redemption By Bryan Stevenson

My project that I created for the assignment, Just Mercy Book Project & Essay was a spoken word poem. My spoken word poem was based on the book “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” written by an attorney, Bryan Stevenson. In my poem I was expressing my thoughts about how the law enforcements are so quick to assume and incarcerate innocent people. The government officials don’t gather enough and proper information to in fact prove that he/she is actually guilty. In society today there have been over 190 people who have been sentenced to death row that are proven innocent. The majority of people who are incarcerated are people of color. Blacks and Hispanics have the highest rate and chance of going behind bars more than whites. In

I believe it was straightforward for me because I already had a thorough understanding of what I wanted to do when my teacher was assigning the assignment. Due to me knowing what I wanted to write, it didn’t take long for me to create my spoken word poem. I would estimate my time of writing and doing the research about criminal injustice was about 2 days. One day I would do my research and start off on my poem. The other day I finished my poem and videotaped myself reading it aloud. Before I recorded myself I did some editing and proofreading. While I was doing my research I came across a video on YouTube titled “The City as a Death Sentence”. Samira Sadeque is the author who wrote and performed the spoken word poem. This performance caught my attention because of how well spoken and detailed she was while expressing her thoughts and emotion into it. She inspired me to put more of my emotion into my poem instead of just expressing my

My project reflects how it is unfair that the government officials incarcerate people who are innocent. In my poem, the second stanza, I indicate the death of Herbert Richardson. Herbert Richardson was a Black Vietnam War veteran who became mentally ill after the war. He got an obsession over his ex-girlfriend and initiated a plan to win her back. His plan was to create a bomb, plant it in front of his ex-girlfriend’s doorstep, and before the bomb would go off he would dismantle it making him a hero. However, a little girl, Herbert’s ex-girlfriends niece, started to mess around with the bomb out of curiosity. This resulted into the death of the little girl and Mr. Richardson was charged with capital murder. They knew he was a veteran of the Vietnam War and was demented because during the pre-trial it was stated multiple times. I believe with an incident like this they should have given him mental help and care instead of putting him on death