The Death Penalty In Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy '

The popular sitcom, The Good Place, takes place in the afterlife. In this show, they are able to weigh all of the actions that were taken during someone’s life. They separate them into a “good” and “bad” point system, and they then use those points as a way to determine where people will stay for all of eternity. While it would be beneficial to have that point system here on earth, we do not. We don’t have the capacity to weigh all the actions in one person’s life and decide a permanent fate. We frequently tend to punish people for an action or even a crime they committed. While actions certainly should have consequences, where do we draw the line for irreversible punishments? In our Justice system, there are many discussions surrounding the

The biases within the justice system make it impossible to evaluate whether or not a person truly deserves to die. In Bryan Stevenson’s memoir, Just Mercy, Walter Mcmillian receives a death sentence despite being innocent. The media and the corrupt officers made it difficult for Stevenson to change the minds of others. While Stevenson was pushing for others to recognize that Walter was innocent, he realized that Tom Chapman, a prosecutor to Walter, just like others was “trapped into this narrative just like everyone else involved” (Stevenson,112). The modern media effectively creates narratives in which Black Americans are seen as suspicious or criminals. When these narratives confirmed people’s biases, it became harder for the majority of people to isolate the facts and form an objective judgment. As humans we are incapable of making the judgment on whether someone deserves to die because we can not remove our prejudices and

It leaves those in marginalized groups to be more inclined to receive not only a prosecution or arrest but severe punishments such as the death penalty for the same crimes. Prejudice and racial bias “have created a system that is defined by error, a system in which thousands of innocent people now suffer in prison”(Stevenson,16). The unjust impact of the justice system is not limited to prison. Black defendants are four times more likely to receive the death penalty than a non-Black person whose situation is similar (“NACDL - Race and the Death Penalty”). The influence of racial biases in our justice system makes it increasingly hard or even impossible to truly make an impartial decision on an irreversible punishment. In Georgia, “people convicted of killing white victims are 17 times more likely to be executed than those convicted of killing black victims” (Philips).The death penalty is even seen as the “direct descendant of lynching” because of the significant imbalance in the prosecution of Black Americans for capital murder (Equal Justice Initiative). Given our long history of systemic racism in the justice system, we cannot trust ourselves to be the ultimate arbiter on whether to end a human