McMillian’s release in 1993 made the front page of The New York Times. Stevenson’s is not the first telling of this miscarriage of justice: “60 Minutes” did a segment on it, and the journalist Pete Earley wrote a book about the case, “Circumstantial Evidence” (1995). Lee Key, takes it upon himself to convert it to the death penalty. When the almost entirely white jury returns a sentence of life in prison, the judge, named Robert E. The reader quickly comes to root for McMillian as authorities gin up a case against him, ignore the many eyewitnesses who were with him at a church fund-raiser at his home when the murder took place, and send him - before trial - to death row in the state pen. McMillian’s ordeal is a good subject for Stevenson, first of all because it was so outrageous. He had, however, been having an affair with a white woman, and Stevenson makes a persuasive case that it made McMillian, who cut timber for a living, vulnerable to prosecution. As Stevenson writes, “Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root.” Walter McMillian had never heard of the book, and had scarcely been in trouble with the law. Monroeville has long promoted its connection to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which is about a black man falsely accused of the rape of a white woman. Its narrative backbone is the story of Walter McMillian, whom Stevenson began representing in the late 1980s when he was on death row for killing a young white woman in Monroeville, Ala., the hometown of Harper Lee. “Just Mercy” focuses mainly on that work, and those clients. Afterward he began representing poor clients in the South, first in Georgia and then in Alabama, where he was a co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson attended Eastern College (now Eastern University), a Christian institution outside Philadelphia, and then Harvard Law School. His grandfather was murdered in a Philadelphia housing project when Stevenson was a teenager. His great-grandparents had been slaves in Virginia. But “Just Mercy,” a memoir, aggregates and personalizes the struggle against injustice in the story of one activist lawyer.īryan Stevenson grew up poor in Delaware. This news reaches citizens in articles and television spots about mistreated individuals.
Even the states that still kill people appear to have forgotten how lately executions have been botched to horrific effect.
Studies cast doubt on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Sentencing guidelines born of the war on drugs look increasingly draconian. The predominance of racial minorities in jails and prisons suggests systemic bias. DNA analysis exposes false convictions, it seems, on a weekly basis. Unfairness in the Justice system is a major theme of our age.
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