Book Review: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice And Redemption

Bryan Stevenson is the leading human rights lawyer in America today. Just Mercy is his first-person account of his work over the last quarter century, mainly on behalf of death-sentenced prisoners in Alabama but ultimately extending to some 2,500 prisoners across the country who were sentenced to die in prison for crimes they committed as children. The book is a collection of humanizing stories about these clients. The names are not the abstract embodiments of case law citations in Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, but the flesh-and-blood characters in the human dramas of Bryan Stevenson’s practice as a lawyer. All these men and women had been condemned either to execution or its harsh, unforgiving alternative, life in prison without the possibility of parole.