Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,”  Spiegel & Grau 2014, 317 pp.

Another from my book club.  This book certainly enlightened me about the US incarceration system and its many cases of abuse that began about 1980 and then accelerated.

Author, Attorney Bryan Stevenson has worked since his early 20s in Montgomery, Alabama.  He established The Equal Justice Initiative which provides legal counsel for people on death row in Alabama prisons. He has gained the freedom for more than 100 men wrongfully convicted. Among the cases he discusses is that of Walter McMillan of Monroeville, who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of a white woman in 1989;  McMillan had been having an affair with her.  McMillan, an African American from Monroe County in Alabama, was sentenced to death by the trial judge, after the judge overrode the sentence reached by the jury. McMillan was kept on death row for 6 years, nearly two which were prior to his trial, in an effort to make him confess. The Alabama Appeals Court ruled in 1993 that McMillan should be freed because of the lack of evidence, his alibi, the unreliability of witnesses, and mishandling of the trial.  Interestingly, this is the same town that Harper Lee lived in and is the setting for To Kill A Mockingbird.

My Notes:

Pg. 14f:  This book provides an analysis of the mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America that began in the 1980s.  Today the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.  The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today.  There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole.  One in every fifteen people born in the US in 2001 is expected to go to jail, one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.  For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole, nearly three thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison.  There are more than a half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980.  Finally, we spend lots of money.  Spending on jails and prisons by state and federal governments has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today.  Privatization of prison systems has corrupted incentives to improve public safety, reduce the costs of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated. 

Pg. 24:  Much of this book revolves around the conviction and imprisonment of Walter McMillian and his experiences with the prison system.  Coincidentally, Walter comes from Monroeville, Alabama, the same town the fictional Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird was from.  The stories are similar except Walter’s story is not fictional; Atticus Finch’s part is played in real-life by the author of this book.

Pg. 29:  In spite of the 1967 US Supreme Court decision striking down anti-miscegenation statues in Loving V. Virginia, Alabama state constitution in 1987 still maintained: “The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendant of a Negro”

Pg. 53:  On August 1, 1987, Sheriff Tate, prior to the trial, transferred Walter McMillian, accused of murder, and the state’s top witness against Walter, Ralph Myers, also accused as an accomplice, to Death Row. This was apparently done to intimidate Myers who wanted to recant his testimony against Walter—it worked. 

Pg. 58:  In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, even though there are sixteen majority-black counties in the state.  Ted Pearson, the DA in Monroe County had been the DA for twenty years and was determined to retire with a victory.  He may have had one lingering concern as a recent US Supreme Court case had threatened a longstanding feature of high-profile criminal trials in the South: the all-white jury.  Monroe County was 40 percent black.

Pg. 70:  Only Florida and Alabama allowed the jury’s decision to be overridden by a judge—Florida later put restrictions on the practice.  However, it remains the law in Alabama where judges almost exclusively use this power to turn life sentences into death sentences, although they’re authorized to reduce death verdicts to life if they so choose.  Since 1976, judges in Alabama have overridden jury sentencing verdicts in capital cases 111 times.  In 91 percent of these cases, judges replaced life verdicts with death.

Pg. 131:  The author discovered checks to Bill Hooks from Sheriff Tate paying Bill Hooks for his testimony that he had seen Walter’s truck at the Ronda Morrison murder scene.

Pg. 151:  As of 2014, Pennsylvania has nearly five hundred prisoners incarcerated for mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen.  It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.  In 2010, Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.

Pg. 186:  America’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.  Mass incarceration has been largely 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.  Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the US have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population.  Nearly one in five prison and jail inmates have a serious mental illness  

Pg. 235:  In the US, the number of women sent to prison increased 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, with close to two hundred thousand women in jails and prisons and over a million women under the supervision or control of the criminal justice system.

Pt. 237:  In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare.  The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes.  These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services,   In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of ‘untouchables’ in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children.

Pg. 243:  In 1992, the year before Walter’s release, thirty-eight people were executed in the US.  This was the highest number of executions in a single year since the beginning of the modern death penalty era in 1976.

Pg. 249:  By the late 1990s, the evolution of DNA evidence had helped expose dozens of wrongful convictions.  In many states, the number of exonerations exceeded the number of executions.  The problem was so significant in Illinois that in 2003, Governor George Ryan, a Republican, citing the unreliability of capital punishment, commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on death row.  (By 2010, the number of annual executions fell to less than half the number in 1999.  Even in Texas, where nearly 40 percent of the nearly 1,400 modern era executions in the US had taken place, the death-sentencing rate had finally slowed.  However, Alabama at the end of 2009 had the nation’s highest execution rate per capita. (p. 280)

Pg. 260:  In the 1990s America was opening prisons at a pace never before seen in human history.  Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the US every ten days.  Prison growth and the resulting ‘prison-industrial complex’—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problems like drug addiction, poverty that led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues.

Pg. 295:  In 2010 the US Supreme Court ruled that life imprisonment without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of non-homicide crimes is cruel and unusual punishment.  Two years later this was expanded to include children convicted of homicides.  Over two thousand condemned people sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for crimes when they were children were now potentially eligible for relief and reduced sentences. 

Pg. 299:  The accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure.  Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation of our history of racial injustice.

The author maintains that there are four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice but remain poorly understood. 

1.      Slavery, followed by the reign of terror following the collapse of Reconstruction in the 1870s and lasting until WWII.  The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty.  

2.     Convict leasing introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to criminalize former slaves and convict them so that freedmen, women, and children could be ‘leased’ to business and effectively forced back into slave labor. 

3.     Jim Crow:  the legalized racial segregation and suppression of basic rights that defined the American apartheid era. 

4.     Mass Incarceration:  the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug crimes in poor communities, the criminalization of new immigrants and undocumented people, the collateral consequences of voter disenfranchisement, and the barriers to re-entry can only be fully understood through the lens of our racial history.

Pg. 313;  The author told a congregation he was preaching to that Walter’s case had taught him that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit.  The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?

Pg. 337:  Author Bryan Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor of law at NYU law school.  He has argued five times before the Supreme Court and won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color. 

Addenda:

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). McMillian’s release in 1993 made the front page of The New York Times.

*At least those on death row get some chance for a review of their conviction before execution.  However, given that the justice system for the poor is so poor, what about those just sentenced to life without parole?  Whoever looks at their cases?

*What was the motivation for the police to manipulate McMillan’s conviction.  The DA and judge had political reasons, but the police??  Of course, the sheriff also had political reasons.

*Incentives provided by any system reliably predict the behavior you will get.  It happens everywhere: finance, sports at all levels, the entire justice system, etc.