Critical Analysis Of Just Mercy

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson

In Harper Lee’s fictional novel To Kill A Mockingbird, an African American field hand is falsely accused of raping a white women. Set in the 1930’s in the small town of Monroeville Alabama, Addicus Finch an even handed white attorney tries to shed a light on the injustice of this innocent black man’s conviction. Atticus feels that the justice system should be color blind, and he defends Tom as an innocent man, not a man of color.

Bryan Stevenson has the same focus in the nonfiction memoir Just Mercy. He uses the pages of his memoir to tell the story of an innocent black man, in Monroeville Alabama who is falsely convicted of killing an 18-year-old, white, female, college student. In this story the year is 1980, but the racial divide still runs deep.

Bryan Stevenson grew up poor on the Del-Marva peninsula, a grandchild of Virginia slaves. He is a public interest lawyer, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery Alabama. He has dedicated his life to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the unjustly condemned (Stevenson, 2012). He writes this book to allow the reader to get close to, “mass incarceration and extreme

Folklorists, John and Alan Lomax told a credible story identifying the Midnight Special as a train from Houston to San Antonio, shining its light into a cell in the Sugar Land Prison; “Let the Midnight Special shine her light on me, Let the Midnight Special shine her ever-loving light on me”. The story relates when the passenger train swept along a curve it would shine a light through the prison bars and if the light would shine on you, your woman was on board with the papers from the Governor to get you out of prison, the light of unmerited grace ("Truth and Justice Watch,"