Just Mercy

Stevenson goes to meet with Walter’s immediate family, including his long-suffering wife, Minnie, and their daughter, Jackie. The McMillian house is in a state of “profound disrepair” and is clearly “a poor family’s home” (93). They discuss the trial before—to Stevenson’s surprise—introducing him to Walter’s 30-person extended family down the road. He sends them love and well wishes from Walter, and they all talk long into the night about the case and what an appeal will entail. He senses that the meeting has given them a sense of hope where there was once only despair.

As he drives back home, Stevenson thinks of the W.E.B. DuBois short story “On the Coming of John.” In this story, a poor black community in Georgia pools money to send its most promising young man, named John, to a teacher’s college up north. He returns after graduation and starts a school for black children focused on empowerment and racial equality. The local white community, feeling threatened, wants the school closed. A white judge orders it shut down. That very day, a distraught John witnesses the judge’s son sexually assaulting John’s sister. Enraged, John strikes the judge’s son with a piece of wood and is killed by a lynch mob. Stevenson, the first in his family to attend college, identifies with John “as the hope of entire community” (100).

Stevenson grows closer to Walter and the two become real friends. Stevenson receives a call from Darnell Houston, who says he can prove of the trial’s key witnesses, a man named Bill Hooks, was lying. Darnell was with Bill at the time Bill claims to have seen Walter near the murder scene. Knowing it’s a long short, Stevenson petitions for an entirely new trial. Darnell is arrested for “perjury,” but it is clearly simple retaliation for talking to Stevenson. Stevenson meets with the new DA, Tom Chapman. Chapman seems unconcerned with issues of bias and perjury in Walter’s trial—Walter made the local white community angry, and that was enough. Stevenson sees that Chapman is “either naïve or wilfully indifferent—or worse” (109). Chapman tells Stevenson that Judge Key has already denied the motion for a new trial. On his way out of the office, Stevenson is outraged to see yet another flyer for the local theater’s production of To Kill a Mockingbird.

One late night, Stevenson receives a call from an old woman in Virginia. She tells him that her fourteen-year-old grandson, Charlie, has been in an adult jail for two days on a murder charge. She is in poor health and unable to see him. Stevenson explains that EJI works on death penalty cases, which Charlie’s is not—the Supreme Court recently forbade the execution of those convicted of crimes while under the age of fifteen. She begs him and prays. He agrees to go see Charlie.

Charlie, Stevenson learns, killed his mother’s abusive boyfriend after the boyfriend nearly murdered her in cold blood. Since the boyfriend was a police officer, the prosecutor intended to try Charlie as an adult and had him sent to an adult facility. When Stevenson meets Charlie—tiny and less than 100 pounds—Charlie reveals he has been raped by several inmates. Stevenson is outraged that this was allowed to occur. Stevenson has Charlie moved first to a single cell, then to a juvenile facility. Over time, Charlie recovers, though he is forever “tormented by what he’d done and what he’d been through” (124).

After telling Charlie’s story to a church group, Stevenson is approached by an older white couple—Mr. and Mrs. Jennings. Their only grandchild committed suicide, and they want to donate his college fund to help care for Charlie, whose grandmother has since died and whose mother is struggling financially. The Jenningses support Charlie as he obtains his GED while in prison, and are there with his mother the day he is released.