Just Mercy
This book is easy reading and goes by fast. It’s about a lawyer who represents death row inmates as well as other mostly poor black folks and children. The stories contained in this book are enough to make anyone’s blood boil and want to start a civil war against the Alabama court system. The book is more than just the complaints of a black lawyer though. Bryan Stevenson has a lot to say about the death penalty and the way we enforce crime in general. This book at times was profound, at other times sad. Most of the time it provided a fairly even take on mass incarceration. I do think the book in general is similar to listening to an emergency room doctor in New York talking about covid, or a general in Iraq talking about the Taliban. What he is saying is definitely true, but also definitely not the case for everyone everywhere IMO. I’ll end this review with a compelling quote on the death penalty which is probably old news for you folks but was the first time I’ve heard it put so succinctly. This quote comes after he personally witnesses the execution of a convicted criminal “We would never think it was human to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would. I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”