Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989 and has spent decades representing people the system had given up on—the poor, the mentally ill, people who were juveniles when they were sentenced to die. Just Mercy centers on Walter McMillian, a Black man sentenced to death for a murder he didn’t commit, and follows Stevenson’s years-long effort to prove it and get him off death row. Woven around that case are others: children sentenced to life without parole, people with severe mental illness executed despite Supreme Court rulings meant to prevent it, and the systemic patterns that produced these outcomes. Stevenson writes without sentimentality. He’s furious at what he’s seen, but the book’s power comes from specifics rather than rhetoric—you see how the injustice operates, case by case. For readers interested in criminal justice, race, or one of the most important legal advocates working in America today