Just Mercy – 2019 – PG13
Exactly four years ago to the day of seeing this film, I sat in awe of Bryan Stevenson, death row attorney & author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, listening to him speak at a local university. Stevenson, born in Delaware and raised in Philadelphia graduated from Harvard Law School and as part of a class on race and poverty served an internship where he met death row inmates, learning firsthand how elusive justice can be for men of color. He was also deeply influenced by his affiliation with the African Methodist Church where members shouldered the community responsibility of helping each other with “standing up after having fallen down.” These experiences formed his unwavering belief that “each person in our society is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.” Bryan would be that helping hand. An activist was born.
One week after hearing Stevenson I closed my Sunday sermon with his quote, “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.” The film version of the book drives this point home. Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan, Black Panther, Creed) fights to free Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, Django Unchained) father of nine, who with zero credible evidence, was convicted of the 1987 murder of Ronda Morrison, an 18-year-old white woman shot in broad daylight at the Monroeville, Alabama dry-cleaning shop where she worked. The state’s case rested almost exclusively on the testimony of habitual criminal Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?) who benefited from a quid pro quo reduced sentence immediately. The sheriff, district attorney and courts, pressed to calm public hysteria by quickly solving the crime used racially-motivated fear, coercion, intimidation and evidence suppression to railroad McMillian onto Alabama’s Death Row. In fact they housed him in a Death Row cell a year before his trial! A trial that lasted one day. When McMillan offered his alibi that dozens of (black) witnesses were with him at a church fish fry 11 miles away at the time of the murder, newly elected Sheriff Tom Tate responded, “I don’t give a damn what you say or what you do. I don’t give a damn what your people say either. I’m going to put twelve people on a jury who are going to find your goddamn black ass guilty.” And they did.
Admittedly the film plods along excruciatingly slow, perhaps exactly what writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton wanted, mirroring our protracted, ponderous, snarled judicial system. A system that grinds at an evidentiary snail’s pace yet producing questionable justice at the finish line. “Brutal.” “Draining.” “Exhausting.” Comments from my movie-mates at the end of Just Mercy. This movie makes you earn it.
Walter sat in his claustrophobic death row cell for six years enduring State persecution as both victim and victor. Victimized by intractable societal racism Walter understands his lot in life, disturbingly so, “You don’t know what you’re into down here in Alabama, when you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.” Yet he defies institutional bars and chains by claiming a freedom of spirit, a life giving approach we witness in Walter’s interaction with Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan, The Last Black Man in San Francisco) a PTSD plagued Vietnam veteran facing death for planting a bomb that killed a neighbor. On the eve of Herbert’s execution, Walter calms him by describing a forest scene, “Now close your eyes, get away from all this. No more walls, no more guards, no more wars to fight, just you, out in the open, fresh air on your face…Look at them pine trees that been growin’ since way before we was born, and gonna keep on growin’ way after we gone. They been through all the same shit we been through and more, but they still dancing in the breeze.” The body may be held captive to unprincipled bondage but by exercising his unalienable right to break free in mind and spirit, Walter escapes.
Attorney Bryan Stevenson, fresh out of school, gasps and glares and grinds his teeth as he personally experiences the cruel subjugation of the powerful over the powerless. A Harvard degree doesn’t spare him from being strip searched or belittled or dismissed, “boy.” He does on occasion fire up and fight back but even then his rage is meted out in restrained and measured doses. Even when you know the ending, it’s hard to watch.
Which pretty much sums up Just Mercy: hard to watch. But watch you must. Weather the unfolding story of prejudicial justice, a tragic oxymoron. Stomach the indictment of the death penalty. I’d wager I wasn’t the only one in the theater with their eyes closed when the jolt of electricity ripped through Herbert Richardson. Just Mercy slowly burns, simmers and finally ignites—demanding action, a call to arms, a catalyst for change, a rally for reforming the criminal justice system that has comfortably settled in as a pipeline to prison for the poor, the undereducated and communities of color. I find it troubling that many of the negative critical reviews of Just Mercy wave off the theme of racism as been there, done that old news. Really? Our current ruthless reality suggests otherwise. Credible arguments have been made that incarceration is simply the repackaging of slavery. Mull that over. The most liberating scene in the film is between Bryan and Walter after a shocking, incredulous court decision is delivered, denying Walter a retrial even in the face of the sole state witness adamantly and courageously recanting his perjured testimony. Bryan, shaken at the turn of events, goes to visit Walter who, despite his return to death row, surprises a humbled Bryan with the gift of redemption, “These fools gone do what they gone do, but if they take me to that chair tonight, I’m a go out smilin’. Cause I got my truth back. You gave me that. You gave it to my family. And nobody can take that from us again. “
What is your truth?
