“Why the hell would you want to represent someone like McMillian?” the judge said.

Even before he got going on the case, the trial judge – aptly named Robert E Lee Key – tried to talk Stevenson out of it. The main irony was that the murder happened in Monroeville, home town to Harper Lee, which just went to show how much Alabama had taken to heart the moral of To Kill A Mockingbird. When Stevenson began looking into the case he was struck by a legion of inconsistencies and ironies. The man in question was Walter McMillian who had been sentenced to death for the 1986 murder of an 18-year-old white woman. “People were being sentenced to death in a perfunctory fashion represented by lawyers who had no idea what they were doing.”īright recalls his young charge returning from a prison visit in an excited state. “When Bryan started looking into what was down there, ye gods! It was horrible!” Bright told the Guardian. Those existential doubts vaporised as soon as Bright dispatched Stevenson to Alabama to investigate its death row. Photograph: Warner Bros/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstockīright remembers his new intern as a slightly lost soul in search of a purpose in life. Michael B Jordan as Bryan Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillian in Just Mercy.

Lesson one, Bright told him, was: “Capital punishment means, ‘Them without the capital get the punishment’.”

The firm’s director, a towering figure in death penalty jurisprudence named Stephen Bright, took Stevenson under his wing and taught him justice, southern-style. He was 23 and a student at Harvard law school when his professor suggested he take an internship in Atlanta, Georgia, with a not-for-profit legal firm.

It is based on the 2014 memoir of the same name in which Stevenson, 60, relates how he came to find himself representing some of the most godforsaken prisoners in the country. His epic six-year struggle to prove McMillian an innocent man provides the narrative arc of Just Mercy. That phrase could stand as a catchphrase for the ingrained racial injustice that Bryan Stevenson, the rookie lawyer played in the film by Michael B Jordan, has devoted his adult life to fighting.įrom his first meeting with McMillian in 1988 to his star billing today as a one of America’s most incisive commentators on race and inequity – and now as a fully fledged Hollywood icon – Stevenson has never taken his eyes off the prize.

Anthony ray hinton just mercy