Summary Of Just Mercy

In the book Just Mercy: A story of Justice and Redemption Bryan Stevenson details his story of his experiences as a lawyer fighting for justice. This story encompasses over twenty-five years worth of impactful cases and how policy changes, due to major Supreme Court cases, were dealt with locally. The main issue that he was dealing with was the death penalty, and how it was systematically being misused. The main focus of the book to showcase this was on the case of Walter McMillian. After the murder of Ronda Morrison, a well known white woman in the area, there was a lot of pressure exerted by the community on the sheriff to make an arrest on the case. After a loose connection between Walter and Ronda, the sheriff decided to arrest him. In

While also being African American himself, Bryan faced being treated differently and specifically discriminated against. To Bryan, it did not seem fair that most of these cases were targeting lower class African Americans, who could not gather the resources to properly get the defense that they needed. The death and life imprisonment sentences were being applied in a discriminatory fashion, as this story comes at a time and place where civil rights was still seen as issue. Some individuals from police to guards to even judges still held on to their misguided beliefs. This lead to Bryan not being enough to influence some of his cases in a meaningful way, and his failed attempts while difficult to deal with at first, pushed him to further try to help these people, and encouraged him to do better. Out of all the people he helped through the years some were innocent, some were mentally ill, and some were juveniles. While the Supreme Court eventually ruled that the death penalty or life sentences should not apply to these groups, such as in Roper vs. Simmons, Kennedy vs Louisiana, and Miller vs Alabama, Bryan still tried to deal with the issue before these rulings, and helped with the influx of new cases as a result of these rulings. Even though the process was slow lower courts and judges eventually started to follow suit with the Supreme Court’s rulings,

There were several factors that we discussed in class that was present in the Walter sentencing. First was the racial bias, when a supposed black perpetrator victimizes a white victim, especially female, the rate of a death sentence is much higher. This case also included a judicial override, in which the judge overruled the initial life sentence and turn it into a death sentence. In the juvenile cases in this book all of them were either waived up to adult court or the sentencing was