Just Mercy by Bryan StevensonBook Review

Hi everyone. I'm Rincey and this is Rincey
Reads. Today I want to do a book review on Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. This is a non-fiction
book following Bryan Stevenson's early career as a lawyer.

He still works as a lawyer. And
he has started this organization called the Equal Justice Initiative where he works to
try to get people off of death row who have been wrongly convicted. There's this one overarching
story that you are following. It's the case of Walter McMillian who was wrongly convicted
and put on death row for the murder of a young woman in Alabama.

And you are following Bryan
Stevenson as he investigates the case, talks to the so called witnesses of the original
case. And he works to try to get this man off of death row. I really loved this book,
but I kind of went into it knowing I was going to love this book because I love books that
talk about either the justice system or the prison system. And Bryan Stevenson is just
such a charismatic writer.

I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel like he really
draws you into the cases that he's talking about and the stories of the lives that he's
interacting with and experiencing himself. Reading books like this can be really difficult
cause, especially if you live in the United States obviously, you are seeing very, very
clearly the problems that are happening within our justice system and within our prison system.
You're seeing how there are these massive cracks and holes and people are just not being
denied what should be their rights as a human being here in the United States, whether it
be because they are a person of color, or whether it be because they're poor, whether
it be because they don't have the education to properly articulate themselves to authorities
or to lawyers. You have lawyers who are working in this system who just care only about the
money or the fame or whatever. You have police officers who are put under pressure to solve
cases in a certain amount of time.

And so they end up just trying to gather whatever
evidence they can to close a case as opposed to getting the right answer. There are all
of these just different pieces of the puzzle that all go against what you think the justice
system should be. And it isn't necessarily the fault of like a single person. Like it's
not just a police officer who's doing something wrong, and it's not just like a single judge
who's doing something wrong.

It's sort of like all of these confounding factors that
just don't work and it makes the system not work. And Bryan Stevenson, as well as his
organization, is working really hard to try to reverse some of that. I think one thing
that Bryan Stevenson does in this book that's really important is he gives faces to the
names and the stories that are happening. A lot of times you just think about prisoners
as sort of these faceless people who don't have any part of them that's really human.
Um.

So he humanizes them. He provides background into their situation and how they ended up
where they are. And he explains how the system has failed these people, whether it be before
they were in prison or while they were in prison. You feel frustration as a reader because
you read some of this and you're just like, how is this possible? In like 2000 and whatever,
15, 16, 14, whenever these cases were happening.

How is it possible in this modern age that
it still feels like we're in like the early 1900s where people are blatantly racist and
believing that black people are just capable of committing these crimes and so it had to
have been them who did it. Or that they aren't worthy of a proper trial or anything like
that. It's just so frustrating sometimes. But Bryan Stevenson also does a really great
job of providing hope in the middle of all this.

He talks about things like mercy and
how necessary that is, not just for prisoners but the way that we as humans show mercy to
each other. He talks about the complexities of this system and of this world and of the
people that we interact with. It's not always these people are good and these people are
bad. People make mistakes but sometimes they needed to be forgiven of those mistakes.

Bryan
Stevenson talks a lot about how, you know, the people that he's defending, they're not
always like 100% innocent, they make mistakes. Walter McMillian himself has talked about
having an affair with someone, and so he's not a perfect person but he didn't, you know,
do the crime that he was convicted of. So in the midst of all of these stories, like
this book sounds like it would be a book that would be really heavy, but Bryan Stevenson
brings this light into these stories, talking about how him and the other lawyers who are
working in this initiative are working to make changes and working to make it so that
it's not as common to find innocent people on death row. This book is just so, so good.
I'm so glad that I read it.

Thanks to Jenny for pushing me forever to read this book because
I feel like this is a book that everyone needs to read, especially if you live in the United
States. I think that everyone sort of knows that the prison system doesn't work well,
but I don't think people also realize how bad it really can be. So I think that this
is a really great perspective into that. So yeah, those are just my quick thoughts on
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.

It's also being made into a movie with Michael B. Jordan which
I am so excited about. I gave this book a 4 out of 5 stars. It would probably be more
like a 4.5.

I've been debating about knocking it up to a 5 cause really, it was a great
book and I really wish there was a way for me to get everyone to read this book. Like
this is one of those books that I think would really change a lot of people's hearts on
the idea of the death penalty and I wish there was more discussion around that. Feel free
to leave a comment down below if you've read this book or if you have any questions about
the book. So yeah, that's all I have for now and thanks for watching..