“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is the Fall 2020 pick for NYU Reads. All undergraduate students at NYU participate jointly in a common reading program, and the Skirball Book Club is reading this book along with them. You can find the NYU Library’s research guide for Just Mercy here.

Bryan Stevenson is a professor of criminal justice at NYU School of Law and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). Since 1989 the EJI has provided legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. Stevenson’s memoir Just Mercy, a film version of which was released in 2019, is both an account of his work with the EJI and a testament to the urgent need to challenge racial and economic injustice and to protect basic human rights for the most vulnerable members of society. In the words of NYU Journalism Professor Ted Conover, writing for the New York Times Book Review, “The message of this book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man’s refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made.”

Talking Points

If you’re not sure where to start a conversation in a breakout room during Book Club, find an example in the text related to one of these themes. Or, pick a passage that stood out to you and share it with the group.

  • Procedural absurdities
  • The relatively recent resurgence of the death penalty in the late 80s in Alabama
  • “The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.” (18)
  • Proximity, intimacy & time
  • Effects of incarceration on both defendants and their families & communities
  • Shifts in focus/detail, including chapters alternating between accounts of Walter’s case and overviews of other structural issues in addition to execution – “excessive punishments, disabled prisoners, children incarcerated in the adult system, racial bias, discrimination against the poor, and abuse of power” (250)
  • The relation of justice, hope, mercy, and a willingness to bear witness
  • “Reciprocal humanity” (290)

Get Into It

New York Magazine

Bryan Stevenson on His ‘Not Entirely Rational’ Quest for Justice

“I don’t think you can do this work if you’re unwilling to believe things you haven’t seen,” Stevenson says.

EJI: Equal Justice Initiative

Learn more about the organization Bryan Stevenson founded in 1989.

The Legacy Museum

Opened in 2018 by EJI, in Montgomery, Alabama.

Bryan Stevenson
TEDTalk | Bryan Stevenson

Close Reading

The distance I experienced in my first year of law school made me feel lost. Proximity to the condemned, to people unfairly judged; that was what guided me back to something that felt like home. This book is about getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America. It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us. (14)

The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. (18)

We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. … It’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and–perhaps–we all need some measure of unmerited grace. (18)

The surreal whirlwind of the preceding weeks had left Walter devastated. After living his whole life free and unrestrained by anyone or anything, he found himself confined and threatened in a way he could never have imagined… He saw in the people who arrested him and processed him at the courthouse, even in other inmates at the jail, a contempt that he’d never experienced before. (55)

Between the passage of Alabama’s new death penalty statute in 1975 and the end of 1988, there had only been three executions in Alabama. But in 1989, driven by a change in the Supreme Court’s treatment of death penalty appeals and shifts in the political winds, the attorney general’s office began vigorously seeking executions of condemned prisoners. By the end of 1989, the number of people executed by the state of Alabama would double. (68)

One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the trauma of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities. (75)

I was increasingly becoming convinced that Herbert was facing execution because he had been an easy target. (79)

When I hung up, all I could think was, why would I need a copy of the order? To whom did the clerk think I would show it? In a matter of hours, Herbert would be dead. There would be no more appeals, no more records to keep. I’m not sure why I was struck by these particular details. Maybe thinking about the procedural absurdities of the Court’s order was less overwhelming than thinking about its meaning. (84)

“All day long, people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’… It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.” (89)

There was a shameful ness about the experience of Herbert’s execution I couldn’t shake. Everyone I saw at the prison seemed surrounded by a cloud of regret and remorse. The prison officials had pumped themselves up to carry out the execution with determination and resolve, but even they revealed extreme discomfort and some measure of shame. Maybe I was imagining it but it seemed that everyone recognized what was taking place was wrong. Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different. (90)

Walking down the hallway to my car I saw yet another flyer about the next production of To Kill a Mockingbird, which just added to my outrage. (113)

I left for home frustrated and worried… From what I could see, there simply was no commitment to the rule of law, no accountability, and little shame. (114)

Some victims are more protected and valued than others. (143)

When the judge took the bench and sat down, everyone else in the courtroom sat down as well. There was an unusually long pause as we all waited for the judge to say something. I noticed people staring at something behind me, and that’s when I turned around and saw that Mrs. Williams was still standing. The courtroom got very quiet. All eyes were on her. I tried to gesture to her that she should sit, but then she leaned her head back and shouted, “I’m here!” … In that moment, I felt something peculiar, a deep sense of recognition. I smiled now, because I knew she was saying to the room, “I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.” (181)

It was the third bomb threat in two months. … After we cleared the building, the police went through the office with dogs. No bomb was found, and when the building didn’t blow up after an hour and a half, we all filed back inside. We had work to do. (203-204)

I was developing a maturing recognition of the importance of hopefulness in creating justice. I’d started addressing the subject of hopefulness in talks to small groups. I’d grown fond of quoting Václav Havel, the great Czech leader who had said that “hope” was the one thing that people struggling in Eastern Europe needed during the era of Soviet domination. Havel had said that people struggling for independence wanted money and recognition… But Havel had said that these were things they wanted; the only thing they needed was hope. Not that pie in the sky stuff, not a preference for optimism over pessimism, but rather “an orientation of the spirit.” The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong. (219)

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States 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 spend lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. (260)

When I hung up the phone that night I had a wet face and a broken heart. The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of records and papers, each pile filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore. … Before I knew it, I was talking to myself aloud: “I can just leave. Why am I doing this?” … After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary or important. I don’t do it because I have no choice. I do what I do because I’m broken, too. (288-289)

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. … Our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. (289)

So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak–not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken… But simply punishing the broken–walking away from them or hiding them from sight–only ensures that they remain broken and we do too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. (290)

I understood that even as we are caught in a web of hurt and brokenness, we’re also in a web of healing and mercy. I thought of the little boy who hugged me outside of church, creating reconciliation and love. I didn’t deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that’s how mercy works. The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent–strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration. (294)