Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy: A Story Of Justice And Redemption

Shyniece Sanders

Professor Alicia M. Anderson

ENGR 199-H01

19 August 2016

“Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” Reflection “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” is a novel written by an American lawyer and social justice activist named Bryan Stevenson. The novel was originally published in late 2014 with the purpose of revealing factual information based on true stories about the American system of justice. Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. While a student in 1983 at Harvard Law, Stevenson was first exposed to death row victims during an internship. After this particular internship Bryan knew exactly what he wanted to do after law school, and that was

Walter McMillian, a young African American man from Monroeville, Alabama was convicted and sentenced to death row after a vigorous murder of a white woman occurred in his town. Multiple witnesses testified against McMillian while the jury ignored many witnesses, who were also African American, who testified where Walter was during the time of the convicted crime. The judge of the trial overrode the verdict for life by the jury and instead sentenced Walter to death. In the novel, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption”, Bryan writes mainly about the case of McMillian along with several other wrongly convicted prisoners on death row.

While reading the novel this past summer, a lot of things written started to reflect life situations. One quote that really stood out was, “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”, written in the introduction of the novel. In dictionary terms, character is defined as the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual. Bryan goes beyond this ingenuous definition by defining character as a form or action and