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The film Just Mercy is a video adaptation of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, published in 2014.The movie is a powerful commentary on the state of the US criminal justice system. Stevenson, a Harvard-trained lawyer, started the Equal Rights Initiative (ERI) in 1989. The organization provides representation to individuals who have been illegally convicted, or unfairly sentenced and abused in state jails, and prisons. ERI’s work revolves around criminal justice reform, racial justice, public education, museum, and memorials. Although Stevenson has represented hundreds of clients since the inception of his practice, the film Just Mercy highlights a few of his most compelling cases. Just Mercy provides an important and sobering look at the criminal justice system and the long arc of efforts to reform it. These reform efforts have been long standing and represent a powerful example of Black-led efforts to reform the criminal justice system.
As the film opens, the viewer is given a panoramic view of rural Alabama, a land of haves and have nots, and racially segregated towns. Just Mercy highlights the case, among others, of Walter “Johnnie Dee” McMillian, a pulpwood laborer in Mooresville, Alabama, falsely accused of killing an 18-year-old white female in 1983. Stevenson, ably portrayed by Michael B. Jordan, takes Martin’s case. Beyond the specifics of the case, the film carefully explores the dynamics of race, class, and gender as they conspire in the most tragic ways. Deliberate efforts to distort the truth began with the false accusation of murder against McMillan. These efforts continue with the subsequent coercion of false testimonies from witnesses who were not present at the crime scene. These events occur against the backdrop of community hysteria related to the criminal tendencies of Black men. These events create the perfect storm for the miscarriage of justice.
A sub but related plot in the movie involves McMillian’s interactions (on death row) with Anthony Roy Hinton, played very ably by O’Shea Jackson Jr. Hinton. Like McMillian, he was falsely accused of killing two fast-food restaurant managers in Birmingham, Alabama in 1985. He was held on death row for 28 years. The details of these cases provide two powerful examples of the individual costs of miscarriages of justice, especially in capital punishment crimes.
While McMillan's and Hinton’s cases demonstrate the impact of these cases on individuals, Just Mercy also visually captures the collective implications of these cases. In a particularly powerful scene, numerous death row defendants recite the inconsistencies in their cases. Most of their State appointed advocates (public defenders) are overworked and underpaid. Others spend more time encouraging clients to make deals in exchange for guilty pleas. Just Mercy artfully confronts the unstated belief that Back defendants are guilty until proven innocent. This reality is compounded by the over reliance on police statements and interrogations, which in some cases, result in confessions that are not warranted or supported by available evidence. The reluctance of district attorneys to review cases and, in McMillan's case, the disinterest in questioning black witnesses and excluding African Americans from the jury further distorts the outcome in the criminal case.
The viewer is also exposed to the wrongful execution of one of McMillan’s cell mates. The viewer is taken on a journey through the complicated and often confusing process of attempting to stay an execution. Beginning with the attorney’s efforts to gather additional information and the court’s refusal to stay the execution despite his military service record and evidence of mental illness. The harrowing preparation for execution: a ritual which includes shaving all of one’s body hair, preparing the last meal and the eerie presence of a “Dead Man Walking.” The finality of the electric chair is juxtaposed with the remaining prisoners on death row sending final greetings mainly expressed by banging on their cell doors. This imagery is powerful and jarring.
The struggle against injustice is as intense in overcoming the assumptions of police officers and the public, as it is in the corridors of justice. Here, we see a reluctant County Attorney, despite glaring inconsistencies, refusing to review the work of previous prosecutors. Jordan’s character wages a relentless war against a legal profession mired by unquestioned assumptions about Black guilt, a reluctance to open previously closed cases and fear of community retribution and backlash. In a particularly riveting discussion between client and lawyer, McMillan sums up the hopelessness experienced by Black and poor defendants on death row: “You don’t know what it feels like down here when a man is guilty from the moment he’s born.”
Although McMillan and Hinton were eventually exonerated, the long years of incarceration exacted a tremendous toll on the incarcerated as well as their families. In one scene, as the family and concerned neighbors gather to hear the lawyer’s strategy to free McMillan, his daughter notes: “we are in prison with him.” This simple acknowledgement captures the communal impact of incarceration. It also dramatizes the impact of these sinister practices on Black communities stripped of fathers, sons, uncles,brothers and husbands. The burden of incarceration falls unfairly upon the backs of Black mothers and daughters who provide the financial, intellectual, mental and emotional labor necessary to sustain families during long periods of incarceration.
In addition to his powerful work as a legal advocate, Stevenson extends his work to cover the broader community. Stevenson’s work is memorialized in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Legacy Museum. Both of these institutional testaments of hope opened in 2018. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, located in Montgomery, Alabama, is the first national museum devoted to the history of lynching. The museum is the culmination of a lengthy investigation of lynchings in the Deep South initiated by ERI beginning in 2010. The report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, produced in 2015. The report details lynching practices in twelve Southern states and in Northern states. The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, also located in Montgomery, is an 11,000 square foot museum built on the site formerly used to warehouse enslaved people. It is also a midpoint between the river dock where slave ships carrying the enslaved docked, a train station and slave market, which witnessed the trafficking of thousands of enslaved people. The museum uses a wide variety of audio and visual technologies to reconstruct America’s history of enslavement and mass incarceration.
Just Mercy is a testament to the determination of the human spirit. A spirit determined to challenge injustice through the forceful confrontation of the legal system and compassionate engagement with its many victims. This film convincingly shows the debate over the carceral state is not new. It is part of a longstanding battle for justice and equality for defendants without proper legal representation due to race, class and gender.