'Just Mercy': An Earnest, Effective Legal Drama
Just Mercy, the attorney Bryan Stevenson's 2014 bestseller, has already become a touchstone of criminal justice writing for helping change the conversation around capital punishment in America. It tells the true story of Stevenson's efforts to free a poor black man in Alabama, Walter McMillian, who spent six years on death row for a murder he plainly did not commit, imprisoned on flimsy evidence brought forward by a white sheriff and district attorney.
The invocation of race, class, and setting in McMillian's case is unmissable â particularly since he was, and residents seemed to be living out a remake of her novel with zero lessons learned. We're in a climate of heightened public awareness around these disparities in the criminal justice system, which means stories like this have become cultural flashpoints for reasons entirely beyond the crime itself. Case in point: The new film adaptation of opens one week after Curtis Flowers, a black man in Mississippi, from a two-decade legal saga that mirrors McMillian's own.
