ARTICLE TEXT

In 1988, a young Harvard-trained lawyer named Bryan Stevenson drove to a prison in Alabama to meet a man on death row. Walter McMillian, a Black timber worker from Monroeville, had been convicted of murdering a white woman on the evidence of a single informant, despite dozens of witnesses who placed him at a church fish fry at the time. The jury had recommended life imprisonment; the judge overrode them and imposed death. Just Mercy is the story of the six years it took Stevenson to free him, and of the many other clients he met along the way.

The Book

Stevenson structures the book in alternating chapters. The odd-numbered chapters follow the McMillian case from first meeting to exoneration in 1993: the informant’s recantation, the threats against Stevenson, the bomb threat to his office, the appeals that failed and the one that finally succeeded. The even-numbered chapters tell the stories of others: children sentenced to life without parole for crimes committed at thirteen or fourteen; a woman imprisoned for a stillbirth; a veteran with severe mental illness on death row; prisoners whose lawyers slept through their trials.

The organisation makes the book work as narrative. The McMillian story gives it suspense; the other chapters give it scope. By the end, the reader understands that Walter’s case was not an aberration but a symptom.

The Argument

Stevenson’s argument is that the American criminal justice system treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent, and that this failure falls most heavily on Black defendants, children and the mentally ill. The death penalty is his central example. The question, he says, is not whether people deserve to die for their crimes but whether we deserve to kill, given how unreliably we decide.

He makes the argument through stories rather than statistics, but the stories are chosen with a lawyer’s precision. Each illustrates a specific failure: inadequate defence counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias in jury selection, the trial of children as adults, the imprisonment of the mentally ill. The book’s most quoted line, that each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done, is the moral centre of a legal case.

The Equal Justice Initiative, which Stevenson founded in Montgomery in 1989, has since won relief for well over a hundred condemned prisoners and led the litigation that ended mandatory life without parole for children in the United States. The book is, among other things, an account of how a small legal aid organisation can change the law.

Why It Matters in Bangladesh

Readers here will recognise more than they might expect. Bangladesh retains the death penalty for more than thirty offences, has more than two thousand prisoners under sentence of death, and imposes well over a hundred new death sentences a year. Its Supreme Court has already confronted the problem of mandatory capital punishment in the Shukur Ali case, and its own docket contains defendants who were children when they offended. The questions Stevenson raises about the quality of defence for the poor, the reliability of confessions and informants, and the finality of an irreversible penalty apply to every death penalty jurisdiction, ours included.

The book is also a portrait of a kind of lawyering that Bangladeshi legal education rarely celebrates: patient, poorly paid, adversarial towards the state, and sustained by a belief that the law can be made to keep its promises. For students considering legal aid or public interest practice, it is the best account of what that work feels like.

Limits

Just Mercy is advocacy, and it reads as such. Stevenson does not give the prosecution’s side in any depth, and his own role is presented with modesty that occasionally shades into self-effacement. The 2019 film, though well made, simplifies the legal detail further. Readers who want the law should go to the book and to the Equal Justice Initiative’s published reports.

Verdict

One of the few legal books that non-lawyers read to the end and lawyers read with their assumptions shaken. It should be on the reading list of every criminal law and human rights course in Bangladesh, and on the desk of everyone who has ever argued that the death penalty is too deeply ingrained to question.

Sources

1. Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson biography: https://eji.org/bryan-stevenson/
2. NYU Law, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy wins the Carnegie Medal: https://www.law.nyu.edu/news/bryan-stevenson-just-mercy-carnegie-medal
3. Wikipedia, Just Mercy (book), for publication details, awards and reception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Mercy_(book)
4. Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2025 (Bangladesh figures): https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Amnesty-International-Global-Report-Death-Sentences-and-Executions-2025.pdf