Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption is a memoir by Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), that chronicles his work defending the wrongly convicted and marginalized in the U.S. justice system, focusing on cases like Walter McMillian’s wrongful death sentence, and serves as a powerful critique of racial bias, mass incarceration, and the death penalty, arguing for compassion and reform. The book, a #1 New York Times bestseller, was adapted into a major motion picture.
Introduction
Higher Ground
I wasn’t prepared to meet a condemned man. In 1983, I was a twenty-
three-year-old student at Harvard Law School working in Georgia on
an internship, eager and inexperienced and worried that I was in over
my head. I had never seen the inside of a maximum-security prison—
and had certainly never been to death row. When I learned that I
would be visiting this prisoner alone, with no lawyer accompanying
me, I tried not to let my panic show.
Georgia’s death row is in a prison outside of Jackson, a remote
town in a rural part of the state. I drove there by myself, heading
south on I-75 from Atlanta, my heart pounding harder the closer I
got. I didn’t really know anything about capital punishment and
hadn’t even taken a class in criminal procedure yet. I didn’t have a
basic grasp of the complex appeals process that shaped death penalty
litigation, a process that would in time become as familiar to me as
the back of my hand. When I signed up for this internship, I hadn’t
given much thought to the fact that I would actually be meeting
condemned prisoners. To be honest, I didn’t even know if I wanted to
be a lawyer. As the miles ticked by on those rural roads, the more
convinced I became that this man was going to be very disappointed
to see me.
I studied philosophy in college and didn’t realize until my senior year
that no one would pay me to philosophize when I graduated. My
frantic search for a “post-graduation plan” led me to law school
mostly because other graduate programs required you to know
something about your field of study to enroll; law schools, it seemed,
didn’t require you to know anything. At Harvard, I could study law
while pursuing a graduate degree in public policy at the Kennedy
School of Government, which appealed to me. I was uncertain about
what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew it would have
something to do with the lives of the poor, America’s history of racial
inequality, and the struggle to be equitable and fair with one another.
It would have something to do with the things I’d already seen in life
so far and wondered about, but I couldn’t really put it together in a
way that made a career path clear.
Not long after I started classes at Harvard I began to worry I’d
made the wrong choice. Coming from a small college in Pennsylvania,
I felt very fortunate to have been admitted, but by the end of my first
year I’d grown disillusioned. At the time, Harvard Law School was a
pretty intimidating place, especially for a twenty-one-year-old. Many
of the professors used the Socratic method—direct, repetitive, and
adversarial questioning—which had the incidental effect of
humiliating unprepared students. The courses seemed esoteric and
disconnected from the race and poverty issues that had motivated me
to consider the law in the first place.
Many of the students already had advanced degrees or had worked
as paralegals with prestigious law firms. I had none of those
credentials. I felt vastly less experienced and worldly than my fellow
students. When law firms showed up on campus and began
interviewing students a month after classes started, my classmates put
on expensive suits and signed up so that they could receive “fly-outs”
to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C. It was
a complete mystery to me what exactly we were all busily preparing
ourselves to do. I had never even met a lawyer before starting law
school.
I spent the summer after my first year in law school working with a
juvenile justice project in Philadelphia and taking advanced calculus
courses at night to prepare for my next year at the Kennedy School.
After I started the public policy program in September, I still felt
disconnected. The curriculum was extremely quantitative, focused on
figuring out how to maximize benefits and minimize costs, without
much concern for what those benefits achieved and the costs created.
While intellectually stimulating, decision theory, econometrics, and
similar courses left me feeling adrift. But then, suddenly, everything
came into focus.
I discovered that the law school offered an unusual one-month
intensive course on race and poverty litigation taught by Betsy
Bartholet, a law professor who had worked as an attorney with the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Unlike most courses, this one took
students off campus, requiring them to spend the month with an
organization doing social justice work. I eagerly signed up, and so in
December 1983 I found myself on a plane to Atlanta, Georgia, where
I was scheduled to spend a few weeks working with the Southern
Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC).
I hadn’t been able to afford a direct flight to Atlanta, so I had to
change planes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and that’s where I met
Steve Bright, the director of the SPDC, who was flying back to Atlanta
after the holidays. Steve was in his mid-thirties and had a passion and
certainty that seemed the direct opposite of my ambivalence. He’d
grown up on a farm in Kentucky and ended up in Washington, D.C.,
after finishing law school. He was a brilliant trial lawyer at the Public
Defender Service for the District of Columbia and had just been
recruited to take over the SPDC, whose mission was to assist
condemned people on death row in Georgia. He showed none of the
disconnect between what he did and what he believed that I’d seen in
so many of my law professors. When we met he warmly wrapped me
in a full-body hug, and then we started talking. We didn’t stop till
