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Justice In Bryan Stevenson's Book 'Just Mercy'

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When you look out at the world today; it won’t take you long to point out all the tragic and horrific things that are occurring daily which include: terrorism, the current refugee situation, genocide, poverty, and mass murders among many others tragedies. Currently in the world today, people desperately need more love than hate, more compassion than judgment, more grace than harshness, and more justice than inequity. These qualities are important (love, compassion, grace) in order to making a difference in the world today, but I want to focus on justice and how it affects people with disabilities. The online English-Oxford Dictionary defines justice as, “a concern for justice, peace, and genuine respect for people” I do not agree with this definition entirely; I believe the word justice is more accurately defined as, “respect and compassion for all people no matter what situation they are in.”
I have not had any personal experience with the criminal justice system, but I have seen a beautiful picture of my definition of justice unfold in my freshman physical education class back …show more content…

In the introduction chapter of Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy, Stevenson states, “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.” I agree with this quote because it is easy to treat people with love and fairness when you like them and when they think and act like you. It is not so easy to treat someone with the same amount of respect and love when you prejudged them or make assumptions about them before getting to know them. It is significant to remember that all people deserve respect and compassion no matter the situation; it is the golden rule being lived out. Treat others how you want to be

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Some of the examples of unfair treatment described in Just Mercy are juveniles charged as adults, trauma not acknowledged, and also mental health/disabilities being ignored. Because of this, there were consequences. This treatment was unfair because it was cruel and unequal within the justice system. One of the unfair treatments in the judicial system was juveniles getting charged as adults. Juveniles would get life in prison even for homicides.

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In Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy, he argues that many states unfairly remove the rights of convicted felons, despite being released from prison. Stevenson, who fights for equal justice and serves as a criminal defense attorney, believes that states have targeted the voting rights of convicted felons, and he explains that “Some states permanently strip people with criminal convictions of the right to vote; as a result, in several Southern states disenfranchisement among African American men has reached levels unseen since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965” (Stevenson 16). In this excerpt from his book, Stevenson is describing how disfranchisement rates have increased rapidly over the past decades, specifically in the Black

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Rhetorical Analysis of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy Bryan Stevenson, a young and impressionable lawyer, whose work with Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC), opened Stevenson’s eyes to the defenselessness of death row inmates. Coupled with his own experience with bias and unfair treatment, Stevenson wrote a book based on the lives of those he helped- and attempted to help. Slightly shadowed by his own bias, Just Mercy was an inciting piece of literature of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020.

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Race, gender, and power contribute to the problems of mass incarceration. In the book ‘Just Mercy’ written by Bryan Stevenson, race, power and gender, play a big role in the mass incarceration of African Americans in Alabama. Bryan Stevenson explains how in Alabama, whites and officers often picked on African Americans and caused harm to them to convenience themselves in cases where there were murders and court cases that were mistrials or the public did not like the verdict. “...about sixty miles south of the city. Donald was walking home from the store hours after a mistrial was declared in the prosecution of a black man shooting a white police officer.

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In the memoir Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, closeness contributes to Stevenson’s success as a lawyer by allowing his clients to form trust, hope, and understanding in the toughest of times. In his autobiography, Steveson relied heavily on the element of trust in order to succeed in his career. Many of Stevenson’s clients, like Walter McMillian, trusted him from the beginning, while others took a while to open up, like Charlie and Ralph Myers. Even after McMillian was pronounced guilty several times, McMillian still put his trust in Stevenson, he never let go of that joyfulness that kept him going.

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Mary Kwentus Mr. Singleterry ENGL 2250 22 May 2023 Social Unjustness In Bryan Stevenson’s novel Just Mercy Stevenson gives his first-person accounts of the social justice system in America and marginalized Americans who are unfairly punished. The novel retells the cases of Stevenson. Stevenson fights to end the justice system’s unjustness and racial discrimination. The novel follows Stevenson as he and his company the Equal Justice Initiative work to help prisoners on death row and give them the legal representation they deserve.

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Bryan Stevenson knew the perils of injustice and inequality just as well as his clients on death row. He grew up in a poor, racially segregated area in Delaware and his great-grandparents had been slaves. While he was a law student, he had interned working for clients on death row. He realized that some people were treated unfairly in the judicial system and created the Equal Justice Institute where he began to take on prisoners sentenced to death as clients since many death row prisoners had no legal representation of any kind. In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson focuses on some of these true stories of injustice, mainly the case of his client, Walter McMillian.

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“But today our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused even the Christian to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion.” (Stevenson) This short quote from Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, perfectly summarizes the message and theme of this fantastic novel. The main point of the novel is that even if we have certainty of someone’s guilt, we do not know the full story behind the alleged crime or the person convicted. We can not possibly imagine what drove them to commit such acts or say with certainty in most cases if they committed the crime at all.

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Just Mercy written by Bryan Stevenson, he had a decade long career as a legal advocate for marginalizing people who have been either falsely convicted or harshly sentenced. Even though the book contains profiles of many different people, the central storyline that the relationship has between Stevenson, the organization he founded and Walter McMillian, a black man that was wrongfully accused of murder and was sentenced to death in Alabama in the late 1980’s. In the book, Stevenson provides a historical context, as well as his own moral and philosophical reflections on the American criminal justice and prison systems. Ultimately he argues that the society should choose empathy and mercy over the condemnation and punishment.

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In Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, he writes to illustrate the injustices of the judicial system to its readers. To do so, Stevenson utilizes multiple writing styles that provide variety and helps keep the reader engaged in the topic. Such methods of his include the use of anecdotes from his personal experiences, statistics, and specific facts that apply to cases Stevenson had worked on as well as specific facts that pertain to particular states. The most prominent writing tool that Stevenson included in Just Mercy is the incorporation of anecdotes from cases that he himself had worked on as a nonprofit lawyer defending those who were unrightfully sentenced to die in prison.

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Just Mercy is a book that opens the eyes of Americans who have no idea what is going on in minority communities. After reading “Just Mercy” I am horrified at how our justice system has been treating minorities in this country for decades. False imprisonment and false capital punishment is one of the worst things that I believe can happen to a person, and this book shows how often it occurs to people of color. Our Judicial system is supposed to be blind to race, religion, ethnicity, culture, gender, etc. However, as shown in the book, it is one of the most racist things in this country.

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Compassion and forgiveness is not something everyone gives but is something you should give to everyone. Even when they don’t deserve it. Compassion and forgiveness is a theme in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee when Atticus tells Scout not to be angry at the people who are against him, when he defends Bob Ewell’s behavior after the Tom Robinson case, and when Scout saw the world in Boo Radley’s shoes. And in real life, when a woman pardoned a man on the gallows, before he was hung, even though he murdered her son, and a woman forgave two boys that pushed a cart over a railing onto her, causing many injuries When word goes around about Atticus’s decision to try to defend Tom Robinson, Scout becomes irked by everyone who mocks Atticus for defending Tom Robinson. Atticus tells her, “It’s different this time [...]

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In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson concludes “the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice,” and by this he means that when there is no justice, most people will live in poverty, despair, and fear. Despair is the complete loss of all hope, and each of these characters felt that feeling. Bryan Stevenson was stopped and searched by the police, and he was full of fear because one officer had pulled a gun on him. Fear, Police rely on fear to break the law and do as they wish, because they know a majority of people are scared to go against the police. In chapter 3, Walter McMillian was in jail awaiting his trial and eventual execution, this alone drove him into a pit of despair.

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Imagine living in a place where one small sin could define who you are for the rest of your life. That is what happened in The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850. The novel is set in a seventeenth-century Puritan community in Boston, Massachusetts. A young woman by the name of Hester Prynne commits a small act of adultery and is shamed for the rest of her life, by wearing a scarlet letter “A” on her breast. The book is centered around the theme of justice and judgement.

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