Just Mercy

If Just Mercy doesn't break your heart and convince you that our criminal justice system needs reforming, I don't know if anything ever will. Stevenson is a lawyer with a non-profit giving people legal help, and he gives dozens and dozens of similar stories that show our broken system: a young teenager, often Black, will commit a stupid crime, often unstable from their abuse in foster care; the prosecutor will succeed in illegally securing an all-white jury; the kid's court-appointed lawyer will be incompetent or wildly underpaid, causing them to completely mishandle the case and provide no adequate defense; the kid is sentenced to death before they've even gone to high school, and they spend decades in prison in terrible, abusive conditions. It feels like a depressing chain of dominoes, and at every step you think “Surely someone will step in and make this right,” but it doesn't happen.

As a Christian I was already disposed against the death penalty because the Gospel teaches us that no person is beyond redemption, but this book has further solidified my view. So many of the convictions may have been unjust for one reason or another, and even one innocent execution is one too many. And more generally, I really agreed with one thing Stevenson said: “The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit... [It's about] Do we deserve to kill?” I think not.

Building from that, he talks very compellingly about how faith informs his work, especially in a chapter near the end about how all people share the same brokenness. It's great stuff, and everyone should read it.