Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

History teaches us that we’ve also been given a legacy of strength, perseverance, hope, and beauty that can empower us to achieve a world in which the children of our children are no longer burdened by the legacy of racial injustice.

“Well, actually, we might even be described as living less than simply. More like living poorly—maybe even barely living, struggling to hang on, surviving on the kindness of strangers, scraping by day by day, uncertain of the future.”

It seemed that we were all cloaked in an unwelcome garment of racial difference that constrained, confined, and restricted us.

“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,” she told me all the time.

This book is about getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America. It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us.

The privatization of prison health care, prison commerce, and a range of services has made mass incarceration a money-making windfall for a few and a costly nightmare for the rest of us.

In this book you will learn the story of Walter’s case, which taught me about our system’s disturbing indifference to inaccurate or unreliable verdicts, our comfort with bias, and our tolerance of unfair prosecutions and convictions.

I have discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity—seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions.

Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.

The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.

Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others.

The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace.

“These aren’t my scars, cuts, and bruises. These are my medals of honor.”

I was around all these murderers, and yet it felt like sometimes they were the only ones trying to help me.

One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities.

Finality, not fairness, had become the new priority in death penalty jurisprudence.

“It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.”

For the surviving black community, there would be more obstacles to opportunity and progress and much heartache. John’s education had led not to liberation and progress but to violence and tragedy. There would be more distrust, more animosity, and more injustice.

“We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”

“They aren’t ever going to admit they made a mistake,” he said glumly. “They know I didn’t do this. They just can’t admit to being wrong, to looking bad.”

As he sank deeper into despair, Debbie Baigre became one of the few people in Ian’s life who encouraged him to remain strong.

But it became immediately clear that their extreme, unjust sentences were just one of the problems that had to be overcome. They were all damaged and traumatized by our system of justice.

“I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.”

And prison is a terrible place for someone with mental illness or a neurological disorder that prison guards are not trained to understand.

“The bad things that happen to us don’t define us. It’s just important sometimes that people understand where we’re coming from.”

But I was developing a maturing recognition of the importance of hopefulness in creating justice.

The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong.

He looked at me and said, “I feel like a bird, I feel like a bird.”

She and Glen were dirt poor, but Marsha had always compensated for the things she couldn’t give her kids by giving them all of her heart.

“We need more hope. We need more mercy. We need more justice.”

Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?

You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.

understood that even as we are caught in a web of hurt and brokenness, we’re also in a web of healing and mercy.

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, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration.

You don’t have anything to cry about. I’m just gonna let you lean on me a bit, because I know a few things about stonecatching.”

And in the end, it was just mercy toward others that allowed him to recover a life worth celebrating, a life that rediscovered the love and freedom that all humans desire, a life that overcame death and condemnation until it was time to die on God’s schedule.