#5 - Final Thoughts - 4/1

(BOOK REVIEW)

    This past week I finished up reading Bryan Stevenson's book, Just Mercy. I really enjoyed reading the book for many reasons, and I was surprised by how intrigued I was with the legal side of it. As you all know by now, Stevenson is a Harvard lawyer who spent nearly his entire career done south helping underprivileged people with legal troubles. Most of the time he worked on getting completely innocent clients off of death row. While his book does keep a very modest tone to a subject usually overflowing with emotion, Stevenson definitely has an opinion on the matter and makes sure it's known to his readers. I've said this countless times, but I feel that it is something that still needs to be said, Bryan Stevenson does an outstanding job making you agree with him without actually making you. He lets you come to your own conclusions but realizes that with the information he presents there are no other conclusions to come to except for his. In this blog post, I'm going to show you how Stevenson answers the question, "what was, or still is, wrong with the U.S. judicial system?", and how he guides you to feel the exact same way about it.

    All of our books that we read for this unit have to do with race. And while race plays a very big role in the developments of Stevenson's agreement, it's not the only thing he talks about. The second biggest focus of his career was helping the mentally ill get the help they needed. Especially back in the '80s and '90s where Stevenson was at the peak of his legal enddvures, the way that the mentally ill were dealt with in the courtroom and in the prison systems was extremely awful. Most doctors used by the courts were ill equipt to identify mental illnesses to begin with, and many of them had no interest in helping their patients to begin with. People whose illnesses go undiagnosed face the full extent of punishment and are often sentenced to life imprisonment or even death without a second thought. Stevenson recognized this fatal flaw in the court system attempted to help as many of those mentally ill convicts as he possibly could. In many cases, he was able to get his defendants off of death row and into mental care facilities where they were given the treatment they greatly needed. However, being only one person he was only able to help out a fraction of the people that needed it, and he believed that countless other mentally ill individuals were put to death or rotted in prison because they did not get the assistance they needed. While this problem has lessened over the years, it is still something that plagues our country and Byan Stevenson recognized that.

    Now, on to what Stevenson identifies as the problems surrounding race in our judicial system. There is no question at all that, especially in the '80s and '90s, and even more especially down in the "deep south", the courtrooms were an extremely unfair place for people with black skin. Now I know I've used the following quote from the book in a recent blog post, however, I feel that this post is easily the time where Stevenson's message regarding race is the loudest and the clearest. He wrote, 

    "...the race of the victim is the greatest predictor of who gets the death penalty in the United States. The study conducted for that case revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. These findings were replicated in every other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place. In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white. Black defendant and white victim pairings increased the likelihood of a death sentence even more." (pg 142)

    Looking at these numbers, there is no questioning, not even for a second, that in this time period the courts were exceptionally racist. Stevenson retold countless stories where judges, police officers, and even opposing prosecutors were blatantly racist to both him, his clients, and their community. It's one thing to be racist, but it's another to destroy or even end one's life just because they look different from you, and sadly this is exactly what happened. There was an instance where Stevenson was defending a wrongfully convicted black man who was placed on death row because "he just looks like he's guilty". The scariest part being that this was the only "evidence" presented, and was enough to sway the all-white jury to sentence him to death.

    While the way race and mental illnesses are treated are both big ways Stevenson shows there is something seriously wrong with the judicial system, his overlying message is much broader. He writes,

    "But simply punishing the broken- walking away from them or hiding them from sight- only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too." (pg 290)

    This just goes to show that what he's really trying to say is that we need to heal these people, and not punish them without remorse. If we were to focus on this healing process like many other countries have started to do, we would see great improvement in all aspects of ours lives. So yes, while Stevenson does want to make sure we all know that people with mental illnesses or different color skin were, and still are, unfairly tried, he also wants us to realize the answer to our problems isn't through punishment, it's through forgiveness and healing.

"BOOK REVIEW: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption." Enidlee Consultants Inc., 16 Dec. 

    2014, www.enidlee.com/blog1/2014/12/16/book-review-just-mercy-a-story-of-justice-and-

    redemption. Accessed 1 Apr. 2021.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. 2019 ed., New York, Spiegel & 

    Grau, 2019.