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Andy Galata

Dr. Nan Woodruff

AFAM 100

November 17, 2017

Just Mercy and The American Criminal Justice System

While American society is meant to be based on the ideas of democracy and

egalitarianism, the criminal justice system often defies this framework when dealing with its own

citizens. The decision-making power given to a small subset of individuals combined with

various societal and institutional tendencies and biases have corrupted many aspects of the legal

system, creating an environment full of unequal treatment and unfair sentencing. Few modern

legal experts understand this as well as Bryan Stevenson, an African American lawyer who has

dedicated his life to defending and representing those upon whom the system preys, especially

death row inmates, through his organization called the “Equal Justice Initiative” . In his book

Just Mercy, Stevenson details many of his experiences and cases he dealt with directly while

providing his own analysis of the criminal justice system in order to provoke thought and critical

examination on the part of the reader. After reading his book and considering his examples, it

becomes clear that the modern American justice system is widely defined by its harsh

punishment and lack of belief in rehabilitation while also showing direct signs of bias based on

race, class, mental health, and age, which reflects various societal issues from earlier periods of

American history.

The American justice system is fairly unique in how unforgiving it is towards its own

citizens. While earlier views on criminology and justice had allocated resources and adjusted
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sentencing based on the idea of rehabilitation, public policy has changed over the last few

decades towards harsher punishments with a largely absent focus on reintegration into normal

society. Smaller crimes, specifically those involving drugs, saw a large increase in sentencing

length, and some states adopted strict mandatory sentencing practices and “three strikes”

frameworks that made sending a repeat offender to jail for life very easy. Overall, this drastic

rise in punishment and severity reflected public sentiment, although the reasons they were

enacted were largely political. Candidates who wanted to project authority and safety advertised

themselves as “tough on crime” because people tend to have little sympathy towards criminals

and deviants. Stevenson noted that this is especially common in states where judges have to be

elected; “Each judge competes to be the toughest on crime. The people financing these elections

are largely unconcerned with whatever modest differences exist between candidates on crime,

but punishment gets the votes,” (70). This shift in legislation created a large uptick in arrests and

led to America’s unusually high incarceration rate, which in turn made prison conditions much

worse as they became overcrowded and resources were spread thinner and thinner. Because of

this problem and the money that could be made by “fixing” it, prison sprang up at an alarming

rate as the 20th century came to a close, creating the “prison-industrial complex” which “made

imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep

expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem,” (260). While crime

must be taken seriously and often cannot be dealt with gently, Stevenson thinks America resides

too far on the other end of the spectrum; the focus on punishment and profit is so large that it

eclipses the collective humanity, which is why Stevenson finds it so disturbing “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).
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Stevenson spent his career fighting the various kinds of injustice that occur in the

criminal justice system based upon several different factors that affect how it treats a defendant.

One of the most prominent of these is race. Because of the deep, divisive history of racism in

America, it has been able to pervade both the minds of justice officials and the institution as a

whole. As Stevenson put it, “The extreme overrepresentation of people of color, the

disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities…can only be fully understood through the lens

of our racial history,” (301). Stevenson himself has experienced this firsthand, as he details being

stopped and questioned at gunpoint by police officers outside of his own apartment seemingly

just because he was black. However, this became less suprising when Bureau of Justice statistics

revealed to him that at the time, black men were four times more likely to be shot by police, a

statistic which has improved only marginally over time. Race also plays a strong role in

sentencing. Stevenson points to the study conducted for the Supreme Court Case McCleskey v.

Kemp, which showed that capital punishment was eleven times more likely to be handed out

when the victim was Caucasian rather than black. Because of the racist sentiments in various

parts of the nation, specifically the South, black people were much more likely to be suspects in

violent crime cases, especially if the victim was a woman, and the use of all-white juries

seemingly ensured that trials and sentencing would not be fair

Similarly, maltreatment of the poor is widespread and difficult to combat. Their lack of

resources does not allow them to hire well-trained and educated lawyers, meaning that they must

make do with the poorly compensated and therefore generally less motivated public defenders.

When initial trials were thought to be unfair, the families of the incarcerated often could not

afford the legal fees for appeals, making injustice difficult to fight. An example of such a

dilemma is provided by the case of Walter McMillian, which is one of Just Mercy’s main
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subjects. When McMillian, a poor black timber farmer, was arrested for a homicide he did not

commit, he was sentenced to death largely because his freely-provided public defender was

incompetent and failed to fully investigate and argue the case. Despite his obvious innocence,

his odds of freedom were small because his family could not afford lawyers for appeals, and the

only reason he was eventually proved innocent and freed was because Stevenson’s Equal Justice

Initiative was federally-funded and did not charge the McMillians. The EJI was essentially

formed for cases just like this, and Stevenson would represent many more poor defendants

because of the system’s bias against them.

Stevenson’s work also helped illuminate the fact that the American legal system is

discriminatory towards those who are least able to understand it: the mentally-disabled and

juvenile offenders. Generally, the mentally-disabled cannot understand the full scope of their

actions due to their diminished cognitive faculties, which makes committing crime much easier

due to lack of situational awareness and defending one’s actions much more difficult. According

to Stevenson, juveniles are not much different, as “neuroscience and new information about

brain chemistry help explain the impaired judgment that teens often display,” (269). Because of

this, society restricts their abilities to operate and live on their own and, especially in the case of

children, deems them too irresponsible for certain rights such as voting and gun ownership.

Only in the court of law are these two subsets of people equated to the fully-functioning adults

around them. Because of most people’s failure to completely understand mental disabilities and

the legal system’s lack of appropriate protections, mentally-disabled defendants can still receive

life sentences or the death penalty. The same applied to children until only recently when

Stevenson got the Supreme Court to agree that applying these sentences to children despite

diminished decision-making abilities was unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual” in 2010 for
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non-homicide crimes and 2012 for homicide. Again, Stevenson felt the need to protect these

people against the seemingly predatory legal system since they were proved to be unable to

protect themselves.

The multiple forms of bias and injustice Stevenson helped to reveal should not seem

shocking once put within historical context. Many components of the contemporary justice

system are simply echoes of past attitudes and institutions. Lynching, for example, was a

common white supremacist tactic used across the South in the post-Reconstruction era to

suppress black freedom after the abolition of slavery. This vigilante approach was based upon

the ideas of vengeance and anger against those who were seen as “out of place” according to

popular racial sentiment. Likewise, Stevenson argues, “America’s embrace of speedy executions

was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white

southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price,” (299). Even lesser sentences have

similar roots. Oftentimes in prison, work conditions were forced, dangerous, and degrading, as

proved by Louisiana’s Angola prison. Prisoners did backbreaking labor, such as picking cotton

for hours upon hours each day, under brutal conditions that made lost limbs and fingers

somewhat common and expected. The liberal use of other punishments or sentence extension

made their odds of ever getting out of prison shrink exponentially, making their condition seem

inescapable. Upon understanding this, its hard to differentiate between this modern practice and

the institutions of slavery, debt peonage, and convict leasing that were once legal but now

formally condemned. Angola itself was once a slave plantation, and despite the passage of about

150 years, little has changed; the powerful profit from the work of those who get little or no

compensation with little regard for their physical or psychological health. While society might

pride itself on “doing away” with these abhorred and abusive treatments, the contemporary
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criminal justice system shows a deep connection to them and makes this change seem much less

drastic if it exists at all.

Stevenson ends with his book with the phrase “the work continues” (316), and given the

current state of the justice system in America, its obvious that we still have much work to do if

we truly want it to represent the ideals with which it was created. Our practices of mass

incarceration and merciless punitive action only illustrates society’s ambivalence and contempt

towards the lower social castes while spending valuable resources on retribution and anger. The

factors upon which these punishments seem to be heavily based- race, social class, mental

ability, and age- are disproportionate given the almost complete lack of control individuals have

over these components of their identity, and until steps are taken to fix this, the American justice

system will continue to be ironically named. However, as Stevenson shows throughout Just

Mercy, society is not without hope. Redemption is not only possible, but has happened, and

many real people have worked and will continue to work towards the noble goals of fairness and

impartiality. The way society treats the lowest of its social groups reflects the society as a

whole, so by continuing to make the American justice system more fair and reasonable, the

country and its people will see marked improvement among themselves.