Just Mercy Book Summary

Book Summary

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Brief Summary

America’s criminal justice system has been known throughout history to have both excessive punishment and mass incarceration. African-Americans, women, and the mentally ill have suffered greatly because of the predisposed prejudices of the courts.

About the Author

Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice activist, founder/executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and a clinical professor at New York University of School of Law. He has worked to help improve the criminal justice system, specifically how it treats the poor, minorities and children. Under his direction, the Equal Justice Initiative has won major challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.

He argued and won multiple cases to achieve Supreme Court decisions that prevent sentencing of children under 10 to death or to life imprisonment without parole.

He initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which honors over 4000 African Americans lynched in the South from 1877 to 1950. He received the Benjamin Franklin Award from the American Philosophical Society.

He was born in Milton Delaware. When he was sixteen, his maternal grandfather was murdered in Philadelphia during a robbery. The killers were given life sentences. Stevenson said of the murder: "Because my grandfather was older, his murder seemed particularly cruel. But I came from a world where we valued redemption over revenge."

He attended Harvard Law School. He worked for Stephen Bright’s Southern Center for Human Rights, which represents death row inmates throughout the South. He earned a JD from Harvard and a Master’s in Public Policy at the John F Kennedy School of Government.

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Key Insights

Understanding the American criminal justice system is an important part of being a citizen of the states.

The author of “Just Mercy” Bryan Stevenson, a social justice activist, has hands-on experience as a lawyer working inside these complex courtrooms and prison settings.

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

With Steveson’s insight, you will learn how the system has evolved from the 80s to now and how the system has treated people of different abilities, races, and gender throughout the years.

Punishment and Incarceration

The criminal justice system in the United States has been under scrutiny for years. It has been featured in movies, TV shows, and books. But, without all the Hollywood glam, it’s a terribly tragic topic.

Since the 1980s, the American criminal justice system has believed in excessive punishment. This began when the courts began convicting people of minor crimes, but doling out major punishments. It happened this way most often when someone had a criminal background behind them. The problem with this was that a little petty crime, such as shoplifting, could put a person in prison for life.

“An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive, abusive, unjust and unfair until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others.”- Bryan Stevenson

At the beginning of the decade, there were 41,000 Americans incarcerated for drug-related offenses. But toward the end of the ’80s, the number of Americans exceeded 500,000. This just shows that what was considered fair and right when it came to punishment changed over that ten years. More and more people were being jailed for committing small crimes.

An example of this unfair and severe punishment is from a woman that Stevenson met in the prison system. She was serving a long sentence simply for writing 5 bad checks, all under the amount of $150, in order to purchase, Christmas presents for her children.

Excessive punishments lead to mass incarceration because the prisons become overcrowded.

To put it into perspective, America’s prison population in the early ‘70s was approximately 300,000. Today, it is 2.3 million. And, that’s not even counting the people on parole or probation!

The Mistreatment of African-Americans

It’s no secret that African-Americans have become victims in the flawed justice system of America.

Because of the long history of bias in America, African-Americans have always been looked at with extra and unnecessary suspicion.

Steveson recalls an encounter he had with the Atlanta police. It’s important to know that the author is African-American. The encounter went like this…

Stevenson was parked in his car outside of his house, listening to his favorite band on the radio. Before he could even react, a police car was pulled beside his and a gun was shoved in his face. The police officer searched Steveson’s car illegally and told Steveson that he was lucky he was getting off easy.

This may seem like a bizarre and crazy scenario, but occurrences like this...