The prosecution hid vital evidence. This includes accounts of eye witnesses who had spent an entire day with Walter at home, located eleven miles from the crime scene; and another one who had seen the victim alive after the time that the prosecution alleges McMillian committed the murder. Records of Myer’s statements prove to be inconsistent and at one point, he complains that the officers are forcing him to implicate himself and McMillian in a murder that none of them committed.
By reading Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy” and the story of Walter McMillian in particular, it becomes apparent that his story is just one of the many that have not yet been accounted for. Stevenson, being the author and legal representative of McMillian, treads a tricky path when it comes to illustrating how bad the system is or how good it feels to triumph amidst
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In McMillian’s case, the power of the criminal law is employed, not to control crime, but to instigate a felony in the form of unfair conviction of the innocent. As much as the reader may want to overlook the possibility of racial influence in this matter, it is impossible, because discrimination against the blacks is a dominant theme in the cases recounted by Stevenson.
To sum it up, the case of Walter McMillian in Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy” explicitly presents him as a victim of the judicial system whose predicament is worsened by the fact that he is black. The themes of constitutional violation, unfair conviction, legal activism, and racial discrimination are prevalent throughout. In a country where people are promised equal and fair treatment regardless of their gender or racial identity, Stevenson, through McMillian, shows the gory side of the reality that exists within the United States’ judicial system. A system that offers justice to some and victimizes