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Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Document Cited authorities 1 Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 October 2018
AuthorPeter Hanink
Published date01 October 2018
DOI10.1177/1462474516685709
Subject MatterBook reviews
untitled
Punishment & Society
2018, Vol. 20(4) 523–536
! The Author(s) 2017
Book reviews
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1462474516685709
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Spiegel & Grau:
New York, 2014; 368 pp. (including index): ISBN: 978-0812984965, $28 (pbk)
More than any other form of punishment, the death penalty lays bare the assump-
tions that underlie the criminal justice system. Most of the various forms of pun-
ishment meted out to those convicted of crimes are built upon mutually reinforcing,
and sometimes contradictory, theories of punishment. However, as the US
Supreme Court recognized in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 US 153 (1976), ‘‘death is dif-
ferent.’’ Its very f‌inality makes it unique among forms of punishment and necessi-
tates that it be subjected to heightened scrutiny. In deciding to execute a convicted
criminal, the state sets aside euphemistic appeals to ‘‘corrections’’ or ‘‘rehabilita-
tion’’ and embraces retribution.
But death is not that dif‌ferent. As in every other part of the American criminal
justice system, the residents of death rows are disproportionately poor, Black, and
uneducated. The same mechanisms that create inequality within our society func-
tion to magnify and reproduce that inequality among the population sentenced to
death. The same barriers that limit the opportunities of the poor, Black, and
uneducated on the outside, foreclose the opportunities of the poor, Black, and
uneducated on the inside.
Confronted with such grim realities, Bryan Stevenson has dedicated his life to
of‌fering hope. For the past few decades, Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative
have worked to free the innocent and seek mercy for the guilty in the American
South. In his memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Stevenson
recounts how he f‌irst came to his vocation and tells the story of American capital
punishment through the cases of the men he fought for.
...

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