Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

Fifty years ago, the prevailing concept in the American criminal justice system was that everyone in the community is the victim when an offender commits a violent crime. The party that prosecutes a criminal defendant is called the “State” or the “People” or the “Commonwealth” because when someone is murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted, it is an offense against all of us. In the early 1980s, though, states started involving individual crime victims in the trial process and began “personalizing” crime victims in their presentation of cases. Some states authorized the family members of the victim to sit at the prosecutor’s table during trial. Thirty-six states enacted laws that gave victims specific rights to participate in the trial process or to make victim impact statements. In many places, prosecutors started introducing themselves as the lawyer representing a particular victim, rather than as a representative of the civic authorities.