When the key witness later recanted his testimony, investigators didn't take him seriously. The trial was moved to a neighboring county, where the black population was low so a nearly all-white jury could be guaranteed. McMillian was found guilty and sentenced to death. Appeal after appeal, met with miscarriage of justice until 60 Minutes made the story national news. After 6 agonizing years on death row, further investigation revealed conclusively that McMillian was innocent.
Stevenson "founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending the poor, the wrongly condemned, and those trapped in the furthest reaches of our criminal justice system" (from the back cover of his book, Just Mercy). He has courageously entered some of the darkest and most dehumanizing spaces of our nation in an effort to restore dignity and beat the drum for justice. He tells his gripping story in Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, a New York Times Bestseller readily found in your local library. Just Mercy is undoubtedly the most important book I've read on my quest to understand racial inequality in the United States. Stevenson's decades of work as a lawyer has taken him behind bars and into courtrooms and archives where you and I will never go. He brings dark stories out into the light, where they can awaken us from our ignorance and indifference.
McMillian's is only one of the many stories Stevenson tells -- stories that began in the 80s and 90s or more recently that are only now seeing the light of justice.
I invite you to listen to Stevenson himself as he describes another problem in the US criminal justice system, the sentencing of minors to life in prison without parole. He writes about a boy named Charlie who watched his mother's live-in boyfriend (a police officer) slug her in an alcoholic rage. She fell to the floor. Blood poured from her head, but the boyfriend had gone into the bedroom, leaving her unconscious in the arms of her son. This was the fourth time the man had beat her to the point of needing medical attention. Fourteen-year-old Charlie unsuccessfully tried to stop the bleeding. Finally, he went to the bedroom to call 911 for help, but found the abusive boyfriend there sound asleep. Before calling for an ambulance, Charlie found the abusive man's gun and shot him to protect himself and his mother, who he thought might already be dead. Charlie was sentenced as an adult for killing a police officer and sent to an adult prison. There he was repeatedly and brutally assaulted and raped by other prisoners (116-126). Stories like Charlie's should leave no doubt about the brokenness of our criminal justice system.
Because of the tireless work of the Equal Justice Initiative, it is now "constitutionally impermissible" to sentence children who are not guilty of homicide to life imprisonment. In cases of homicide it is no longer mandatory to sentence children to life without parole (295). This will help young people like Charlie who act in self-defense. Over 100 prisoners have been released from death row. But the work of restoring dignity and working for a more just society is just beginning.
In April 2018, a new museum was opened in Montgomery, Alabama. It unveils the sordid story of America's recent past in order to open the way for a more hopeful future. Rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration still make it more dangerous to be black and innocent than to be white and guilty. This should not be. In his late 20s, Stevenson himself was confronted by police without cause, who illegally searched him and his car while parked outside his own apartment, quietly listening to a song on the radio. He knows firsthand how dehumanizing the wrongful assumption of guilt can be. That evening, his only guilt was being black in America.
The roots of racial prejudice still run deep. Although the US federal prohibition on inter-racial marriage was abolished in 1967 (Loving v. Virginia), by 2011 46% of Mississippi Republicans still supported a ban (29). As long as we see those with different skin color than our own as anything other than fellow humans made as God's image, we perpetuate an injustice that looks at a human and sees something less. I fear that as white Americans slowly leave behind prejudice against those of African descent, it will merely be replaced with a new "Other" -- immigrants from the Middle East or Latin America, or Asia.
Bryan Stevenson's book is no easy read. It will wreck your day, as this blog post has wrecked mine. But the longer we hide from reality, the longer injustice prevails. Let's work for a better future -- for everybody. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Human. What will it take to live like we believe this is true?
