April 9 - 15, 2021

On June 19, 2020, I made a commitment to educate myself on the lingering effects of racism, discrimination, and bias in America. Every day through June 18, 2021, I will read an article or book chapter, listen to a podcast, watch a movie or documentary, view a webinar, or do something substantive to educate myself in these areas. As part of that commitment, I will post to this blog each Friday with a list of what I've done over the past week as well as any pertinent thoughts or reflections.

Today's post covers the week of April 9-15, 2021.

 

Just Mercy 

This week, I read the first eight chapters of Bryan Stevenson's 2014 best seller Just Mercy. The book details Stevenson's early civil rights work and founding of the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit legal practice focused on defending the poor, wrongly condemned, and those trapped by the criminal justice system.

 

Stevenson begins by taking us back to his law school days at Harvard. He had studied philosophy in college and was unsure of what he wanted to do next, so he went to law school. It wasn't until he took a one-month intensive course on race and poverty litigation that he began to find his purpose as a future attorney. While interning with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, he visited his first death row prisoner. That visit changed Stevenson - in his own words, it "altered something in my understanding of human potential, redemption, and hopefulness."

 

Stevenson shares the stories of several prisoners throughout the first half of the book, including those condemned to die, and children who had been sentenced to life in prison without parole. The cases largely focus on the American South, and Alabama in particular, which at the time (the 1980s) had no public defender system to legally represent death row inmates. The book's main story centers on Stevenson's representation of a Black man named Walter McMillian, who had been convicted of the capital murder of a white woman.

 

McMillian had been charged and convicted based on the eyewitness testimony of a man named Ralph Myers, who had given an account of what he saw that day in exchange for leniency in another murder case. Myers later recanted his testimony, at which point the state sent him to death row - a move likely designed to scare Myers. When he then went back to his original statement, he was taken off death row and put in another prison.

Stevenson's work on behalf of McMillian highlighted several other problems with the conviction. The trial of McMillian had been moved from Monroe County, with a heavily African-American population, to Baldwin County, which was only 9% Black. This change resulted in an all-white jury trial for McMillian. Bill Hooks, a jailhouse informant, was paid by the local sheriff for his corroborating testimony against McMillian. And several witnesses placed McMillian at home at the time of the murders, where his family was hosting a fish fry. To which Walter's sister said:

 

I feel like they done put me on death row too. What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm's way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain't do and send you to death row?

 

Stevenson weaves so many other compelling stories throughout the book, particularly about incarcerated children. While I don't want to share all of these in the blog (and spoil the book for you), I will say that Stevenson provides numerous examples of children convicted and sentenced to harsh penalties where the circumstances of their upbringing, home environments, and financial and mental well-being could have pointed to more merciful penalties focused on education and rehabilitation and not sentences of life in prison. Unfortunately, the rigidity of many state laws and poor legal defenses haven't enabled these prisoners to get full consideration of such factors in their sentencing.

 

The remainder of the book will be the subject of next week's blog.