Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy recounts his career as a civil rights lawyer. He reviews several cases as well as some of his personal experiences outside the courtroom, weaving them within an overarching review of one particularly riveting case. The "just" in the title has to do with justice. Stevenson writes a compelling narrative that took on added significance for me against the backdrop of 2020's protests of alleged murders of unarmed black men and women by police and white vigilantes.
This powerful history deserves a careful and complete reading. Some of the wisest and most powerfully redemptive passages are within the last twenty pages of the book. They cannot be appreciated fully, however, without reading what goes before, however painful that may be for whatever reason. I worked for several years as a corrections counselor; a son of mine is a guard at a state prison. I met people who seemed thoroughly evil. Some were prisoners. I met others whose convictions would later be overturned because they were innocent. Those experiences gave me some context for reading this book. People who are victims or vulnerable often need advocates, whether legal ones like Stevenson or people who speak up or intervene when they see injustice. A sobering moment in the book is when a church refrains from supporting a falsely accused member because he has had an imperfect past. Read this book and ask yourself, as I did, how you may be a "stonecatcher."
