“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood.” —Bryan Stevenson
Thursday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m. Arm in Arm will host a Zoom discussion of “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson. Registration for this latest in a series of townwide reads, free and open to everyone and designed to explore issues of diversity and inclusion, is at the “Upcoming Events” link at arminarmharvard.com. The book recounts Stevenson’s more than 30-year commitment to provide legal aid to prisoners on death row, the haunting stories of the condemned, and the outrageous injustices and inhumanity of the penal system.
Attorney and activist Bryan Stevenson. (Courtesy photo)
Bryan Stevenson felt out of his element as a 23-year-old Harvard Law School student in 1983. He grew up in a poor, rural, racially segregated settlement in Delaware, and it was the racial injustices he experienced in his community that had motivated him to consider law. He recognized that he had been struggling his whole life with the question of how and why people are judged unfairly. But the courses at Harvard seemed esoteric, and he felt his classmates held very different values from his. It wasn’t until he had an internship in Georgia and met a death-row prisoner named Henry, whose dignity and humanity deeply touched him, that he knew it was his calling to help those condemned to execution. He spent the rest of law school intent on learning all he could about the laws and doctrines that sanctioned the death penalty, constitutional law, and the law of race, poverty, and power. After six years Stevenson and a colleague opened the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama.
While he writes about many people whose defense he undertook, Stevenson returns again and again to the case of Walter McMillian over the course of the book. Walter was a Black man who, through his own industry, had a successful business that made him an object of suspicion to some white officials in his rural town. When it was learned he had a brief affair with a white woman, resentment toward him grew. Because of these prejudices, he became a likely suspect when an 18-year-old white woman was murdered, even though there was no evidence. A Black stranger claimed he had seen Walter at the scene of the crime, though it was obvious the witness was lying to get out of his own criminal charge. Pressured to bring justice for the victim, the sheriff arrested Walter, despite the fact that at the time of the crime, Walter was at a party where dozens of family and church members could confirm he could not possibly have committed the murder. Walter was charged with capital murder and put on death row even before a trial. For no reason, there was a change of venue to a county where there would be few, if any, Black jurors. For six years Stevenson fought for retrial for Walter and to have new evidence admitted. His requests were continually refused.
Stevenson takes on as many other cases as he possibly can, some of them children. For a stretch of time, Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state—or any other country in the world. In 1988 the Supreme Court barred the death penalty for children under 15, but that didn’t stop the traumas of life imprisonment. Charlie, a 14-year-old boy with no criminal history, admitted to shooting a man, George, who had regularly abused his mother and had just slammed her to the floor where she was unconscious and bleeding profusely. The prosecutor knew George and was prejudiced in his favor; he insisted Charlie be tried as an adult. Imprisoned in an adult facility, Charlie was sexually assaulted by many men. Trina, a victim of mental illness, poverty, and abuse, and guilty of accidentally causing a death, spent 38 years imprisoned because a judge had insisted none of those factors could be taken into account during sentencing to life imprisonment. Thirteen-year-old Ian, coerced to plead guilty, was sent to an adult prison and put in solitary confinement, ostensibly for his own protection. He spent 18 years in uninterrupted imprisonment in “a concrete box the size of a walk-in closet.”
Warehouses for the mentally ill
Stevenson says our prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. Mass incarceration has been fueled by misguided drug policy and excessive sentencing, but the internment of hundreds of thousands of poor and mentally ill people has been a driving force in achieving our record levels of imprisonment. An example is a man named George, who suffered brain damage in a car accident but never sought medical treatment. An officer with a reputation for aggression responded to a trespassing complaint about George and was forcefully removing him. When George resisted, the officer pulled his gun, which went off in the scuffle. The officer died and George was given the death penalty because of a falsely licensed doctor who did not declare mental incompetency. Stevenson points out that so many times a person’s disability is disregarded in evaluating what degree of culpability to assign and what sentence to impose.
Stevenson reaches a personal crisis after more than 25 years: “I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore.” But he realizes that he does what he does because he’s broken, too. He goes on to say we all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. Being broken is what makes us human. But our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. “Simply punishing the broken only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. I had a notion that if we acknowledged our brokenness, we would no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.”
One can’t help but be appalled and frustrated by Stevenson’s stories of corruption and injustice in the system and the suffering of those incarcerated—often wrongly. But his determination to continue to work for prison reform is heartening, and there have been successes. Stevenson says he and his colleagues succeeded in getting the U.S. Supreme Court to declare several sentences imposed on children as cruel and unusual punishment and constitutionally impermissible. They also won relief-—new trials or sentencing hearings—for 100 death row prisoners in Alabama who had been illegally convicted or sentenced. And they made progress on a number of other fronts.
Stevenson says he continues to meet people who inspire him and make him believe that “we can do better than we’ve done for the accused, convicted, and condemned among us—as well as those who are victimized by crime and violence—and that all of us can do better for one another. The work continues.”
