Just Mercy was a fantastic read for me. I enjoyed every aspect of the plot, characters and themes. Now, I am more than happy to analyze it. The novel Just Mercy was written by Bryan Stevenson in 2014. Being a book regarding race, discrimination and the judicial system, this book sparked many readers’ interests. It received a very vast following during the span of five years, with many readers feeling a great sense of emotion. There are many things that makes Just Mercy a riveting read, but one of the themes that Just Mercy portrays to its audience are hope, perseverance, egregiousness and most importantly, resilience through its wide range of tone, voice and evidence.
Throughout the book, Stevenson demonstrates tone of egregiousness with tone and evidence, and that there are so many miscarriages of justice and that they should be remedied. The prison, in Stevenson’s eyes, were “warehouses for the mentally ill” (Stevenson 186), which drives the point home that there must be some form of justice that must be done, because there is no one that supports fair justice. Further backing up this point, he proceeded to describe it as “a racial disparity that is woven into this Prison-Industrial Complex. People of color, especially African-Americans, are arrested, convicted, and given the death penalty at far higher rates that white Americans (Stevenson 142).” giving some discrimination of how both races were treated in terms of the judicial system, which prompts Stevenson to take some drastic measures to stop it. He eventually proceeds to add statistics that “We the people of The United States of America “have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. [Our] prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today” (Stevenson 15). Further expanding on his point, he adds, “In the United States, the number of women sent to prison increased 646 percent between 1980 and 2010” (Stevenson 233) and as a result, “Spending on jails and prisons by state and federal governments has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today, creating a profit motive to imprison increasing numbers of people” (Stevenson 16). He soon offers a call to action of “We all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace” (Stevenson 18). This call to action led him to founding the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) an agency geared to solving cases of injustice. Stevenson describes capital punishment “them without the capital get the punishment” (Stevenson 4), saying that the victims don't get a trial but instead get their jail time and get sent on death row.
Stevenson has shown a substantial amount of hope and perseverance throughout the novel.The way that Stevenson “assembles evidence pointing overwhelmingly at McMillan’s innocence” (Stevenson 131, 132) shows that not only was he determined to defend McMillan, but also giving a hopeful feeling that there is at least one person—Stevenson—that is willing to help carry that justice, even with the lack of evidence, the court dismissed McMillan’s appeal. Stevenson, however, chose to fight for McMillan because it wasn’t a just way to treat a black person such as himself.
Stevenson had to deal with an enormous amount of backlash working in the EJI (Stevenson 275, 276), EJI was still resilient and did not allow failure to deter them. And, as a result, “Mr. Hinton became the 152nd person in America exonerated and proven innocent after having been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death” (315). EJI also “won release of Robert Caston, inmate who spent 45 years at Angola for a non-homicide crime at age 16. (Stevenson 304) as well as “EJI wins constitutional ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children convicted of homicides (Stevenson, 295) and “EJI wins release of Joshua Carter, a 16 year old African American (Stevenson 304). All of these instances shows the amount of effort and determination Stevenson harbored, when he could have given up due to the nature of society and the ineffectiveness of his work. Especially during that time he was tired to the bone and was close to giving up. However, he had many supporters that kept him going and reminded him of his duty, which led him to many greater successes than these.
The novel Just Mercy, is a novel that showed the true colors of society during the 20th century, mostly focused on the judicial system. During that time, discrimination and racism has boiled into the court system, causing unfair trials and unessesary death penalties, even if there are abundent evidence in the defendent’s favor. Stevenson goes through the growing pains of realizing his god-given duty and executing that duty to the best of his ability—which is to fight for fair justice, mostly for the black community who were more vulnerable to the flaws of the judicial system at that time.
Given the excellent composition of tone and voice, Just Mercy has transformed into an amazing and heartfelt narrative that keep their readers reading with curiosity and emotion.
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