Director Destin Daniel Cretton
Bryan Stevenson
Actor Michael B. Jordan (left) with Bryan Stevenson
JUST MERCY B
USA (136 mi)
2019 d: Destin Daniel Cretton Official
site
The power of just mercy is that it belongs to
the undeserving.
— Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and
Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (354 pages), 2014
Inspired by real
events, the film follows the aspiring career of Harvard educated lawyer Bryan
Stevenson, Michael B. Jordan from Fruitvale
Station (2013), soft-spoken and reserved, always showing restraint,
formally dressed in a suit and tie, adapting his 2014 published memoirs by the
same name, growing up in a poor rural community, initially working out of a
private residence before setting up practice of the Equal Justice Initiative in
Montgomery, Alabama, a law office providing free legal representation to
prisoners condemned to death row in the state of Alabama who have been denied
access to a fair trial. According to the
film, Bryan Stevenson has worked to release 140 death row inmates in Alabama,
where one in 9 death row inmates have been exonerated based on wrongful
convictions, resulting in exonerations far higher than for any other category
of criminal convictions, where perjury/false accusations and official
misconduct are the leading causes of wrongful convictions, which typically go
unchallenged by the court appointed lawyers, exposing poor blacks to an unequal
judicial process where justice for the poor almost never happens, as it’s
reserved instead for the wealthy elite who can pay for it, effectively dividing
the nation into two separate and unequal factions where the law is applied
differently, disclaiming the inscription engraved into the U.S. Supreme Court
building that promises “Equal Justice Under Law.” Made by the director of Short
Term 12 (2013), Hawaiian filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton integrated his own
personal experiences from working at a group home for at-risk teenagers in
pursuit of altering our perceptions of kids stuck in a dehumanized system
struggling for survival. Here he
examines the inequities of the death penalty when empowered and administered by
Jim Crow ethical standards, where obtaining a conviction by law and order
district attorneys supersedes any pursuit for the truth, as this is the
political platform they run on to get elected, making the community a safer
place to live, which all but excludes the black community, where residents
historically are forced to live in fear of the police and the authoritatively
repressive judicial system where innocent men routinely get charged and
convicted for crimes they never committed.
Added to the mix are prisoners who did commit crimes, but were sentenced
with greater severity due to an inherent bias leveled against blacks. The effects of racism, such a prevalent
condition in our society, continue to exist on so many levels, yet the place
where its impact is felt the most is the judicial system where blacks continue
to be warehoused into lengthy periods of incarceration at record levels, where
there aren’t enough lawyers assisting the poor, and racial minorities are
routinely excluded from jury service, particularly in poor rural counties,
making it difficult to put an end to these reprehensible and often antiquated
practices. Major cities are not immune
from this same racial differentiation, as blacks nationwide are 30% more likely
than whites to be sent to prison for committing the exact same crime (Sentencing
Commission Finds Black Men Receive Longer ...). While this film shines a light to expose the
inequities, accentuating trials that are marked by blatant racial bias or
prosecutorial misconduct while highlighting the damage done to families and
communities, yet this inherent racial bias has simply become a routinely
accepted standard deeply entrenched into the fabric of the judicial system in
America, where the death penalty is a direct descendant of lynching. By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced
lynchings for the first time. Two-thirds
of people executed in the 1930’s were black, yet even after the
African-American share of the South’s population fell to just 22% by 1950, 75%
of people executed in the South were black.
More than eight in ten lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the
South, as did more than eight in ten of the nearly 1500 executions carried out
in this country since 1976 (Death
Penalty - Equal Justice Initiative).
One of the inherent
flaws of the Hollywood system is there aren’t enough black filmmakers given the
opportunity to make films like this, so the stories continue to be told by
people outside the black community, offering a more stereotypical vantage point
and a decidedly different emotional texture, where the structure of the film
itself becomes stereotyped as a crusader movie, where in this case the “white
savior” has been replaced by a “black savior,” yet in Alabama, the ultimate
decisions are rendered by white judges from one of three appellate courts, the
state Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, and Court of Civil Appeals,
totaling 19 judges, where there is a noticeable absence of black judges in such
prestigious positions, (Why
Aren't There More Black Federal Judges in Alabama ...). One of just five states that hold partisan,
statewide elections for judges (in a state that is nearly 70% white, where
judges boast during their campaigns about the number of death sentences they’ve
imposed), since 1994 every black candidate for the state’s 19 appellate
judgeships has lost to a white candidate, with the courts remaining all-white
and all-Republican (including 41 of the state’s 42 elected district attorneys),
where according to a 2012 report, white judges are four times more likely than minority judges to dismiss race
discrimination cases. Despite
overwhelming evidence to suggest bias that stems from the days of slavery to
Jim Crow to lynching, where the original commerce conducted in Montgomery,
Alabama was in enslaved people, the location of Stevenson’s Equal Justice
Initiative office is just steps away from where they once held massive slave
auctions, bringing people off the boat, parading them up and down the street in
chains, becoming the most active slave-trading space in America for almost a
decade, with dozens of cast-iron historical markers celebrating aspects of the
Confederacy. Little has been done
historically to humanize the criminal justice system, with this film providing
a face for viewers to empathize with, as one of the most incendiary cases is
that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), known as Johnny D, sentenced to death in
1987 for the murder of an 18-year old white girl who worked as a clerk in a dry
cleaning store in Monroeville, Alabama, based solely on the questionable
testimony of a white convict, Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson), ignoring multiple
black alibi witnesses at the trial, which lasted just a day and a half. While the jury sentenced him to life
imprisonment, the judge (aptly named Robert E. Lee Key) overruled the jury and
sentenced him to death, with judicial override accounting for 20% of the people
currently sitting on death row in Alabama, a practice that was outlawed by the
state in 2017, yet the state persists in executing people on death row prior to
the implementation of the law. Despite
the flimsy evidence to convict, McMillian lost all his prior appeals for a new
trial. By the time Stevenson meets him
in prison, he’s lost all hope, showing little interest in a wide-eyed Ivy
League lawyer from the north who knows nothing about the ways of Alabama. The tone of the film resembles IN THE HEAT OF
THE NIGHT (1967), pitting the legal sophistication of Stevenson against the
antiquity of southern racism, where humiliating blacks and instilling fear is a
way of life, fueled by a venomous culture of white supremacy that historically
produced lynchings and killings, yet established in heinous acts just how
blacks are treated in the Jim Crow South.
In contrast, Atticus Finch, the white court-appointed lawyer portrayed
by Gregory Peck in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), was voted as the greatest hero
of all American cinema in 2003 by the American Film Institute, AFI's
100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains - Wikipedia, where the courtroom
sequence of the film adaptation was set in a courthouse in that same
Monroeville, Alabama that remains the town’s main tourist attraction. Even in the UK, a 2016 literary survey voted
Atticus Finch the most inspiring character in literature (To
Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch voted most inspiring ...). And therein lies the problem with films like
this, as the white idealization is overwhelming, requiring a Messiah-like
figure to stand up to centuries of appalling racial animosity, making audiences
feel good, but the entrenched systematic bias continues, where mass
incarceration of black people actually defines the era we are currently living
in.
While Stevenson has
consistently been recognized as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in
America, awarded a MacArthur Grant among a multitude of distinguished honors
and awards, Brie Larson stars as Eva Ansley, adding Southern flavor as the
local girl who becomes the operations director, described by Stevenson as
“fearless and smart,” who’s been there since the beginning working side by side
with Stevenson (actually starting on her dining room table), working long hours
into the night, assisting him on his exhaustive research, providing
administrative duties while handling the reporting and accounting of their
federal funding. While not an attorney,
she’s a mom committed to rectifying what she sees as terrible injustices happening
within her community, with most content to allow racial transgressions to
continue unabated, but she feels a moral obligation to do something about it,
to be on the side providing social justice.
While the film has a formulaic structure to it, the authenticity of the
characters stand out, where the best moments are often reduced to small
extended scenes in tiny rooms or prison cells, intimate conversations that
don’t overreach, becoming remarkably poignant and quietly affecting, offering a
deeply ingrained understanding of just who and what we’re dealing with. Whether it be Stevenson’s visits to Holman
Prison or the time spent with each of the death row prisoners he meets, their
images are seared into the viewer’s imaginations, becoming permanent fixtures,
with each telling their own story of how they became ostracized and rejected by
society, stripped of any self-worth, dehumanized, often doubting their own
innocence, as that guilty verdict has been drummed into their consciousness. Stevenson’s role is to take each of these
essentially dead souls and bring them back to life, challenging the negative
stereotypes, where it’s easy to pass judgment, showing another side, one that
viewers can relate to. He starts by
visiting McMillian’s family living on the outskirts of town, mirroring similar
visits made by Atticus Finch, where one gets the feeling so little has changed
for these families since the Civil Rights era of the last 50 years, where
progress was granted to a few, yet a large majority in rural America were left
behind, the living examples of a separate but unequal society. While they’ve essentially taken away all that
matters to McMillian, what’s clear is no one in his community thinks he did it,
while the white community is in near unanimous agreement that he did. So when a black lawyer starts poking around
with these unsettling, racially tinged cases that already led to a conviction,
the white community resents someone stirring up all these ancient memories, as
they rest easily, content to lock him up and throw away the key, believing the
case is closed. Rafe Spall is Tommy
Chapman, the newly elected white District Attorney, yet he shows no
inclinations to reopen the case, believing Stevenson is alone and isolated,
where he is perceived as no threat. But
the more he looks into these cases, the more he becomes convinced these cases
are a travesty of justice, filing legal briefs bringing new evidence into light
that question the legitimacy of the verdict, yet appeals courts in Alabama
rarely overturn the convictions of death row inmates. While there are setbacks along the way, and
frequent intimidation tactics that recall the times of antiquity, one central
focus of the film is witnessing in stark detail the execution of a prisoner, a
chilling reminder of what this is all about, as Alabama consistently has one of
the highest execution rates in the United States, executing 11 people convicted
by juries of a life sentence, overridden by judges and instead condemned to
die. It’s an emotional tearjerker
fraught with heartbreak and personal anguish, as setbacks are built into the
system, creating an underlying feeling of helplessness and systematic malaise,
but Stevenson and his crew persevere, growing his practice, hiring more staff,
eventually accomplishing the unimaginable.
'I
went to death row for 28 years through no fault of my own ...
Anthony Ray Hinton endured almost three decades behind bars on death
row, wrongly convicted by Alabama’s racist judiciary system, telling his
incredible story to Chris McGreal from The
Guardian, April 1, 2018
Why
Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society | People ...
Chris Hedges interview with Bryan Stevenson from Smithsonian magazine, December 2012
Bryan
Stevenson and the Legacy of Lynching | The New Yorker
Jeffrey Toobin, August 15, 2016
