Post #4: Argument

Hi Readers!

For this week’s reading, I learned more about Walter McMillian’s trial and the outcome of his situation (which is good news). After a long wait and many hours of work, Walter McMillian is now a free man! While it was long overdue, it was still nice to see that Walter finally got some justice after everything the system had put him through. Also, while Walter’s freedom was the most exciting part of the reading, there were still other things that Stevenson talked about. The reading started off by talking about mental illness both throughout prisons and in criminals. Lastly, Stevenson talked about how women are also criminalized easily and sent to jail with little or no crime committed.

Now, as we are approaching the end of this fantastic book, I thought it would be good to discuss what Bryan Stevenson’s arguments are. Stevenson’s main argument throughout the book is that the criminal justice system is severely flawed and is racially biased towards black people. On top of that, he also argues that the criminal justice system targets lower-income people because of the stereotype that low-income people are bad people. He makes these arguments through examples of men, women, and even children that he has worked with and helped. 

As I mentioned before, one of the ways that Stevenson makes his argument is through the women he has worked with. One woman he worked with was Marsha Colbey, a low-income mother of six. After Hurricane Ivan hit Alabama, Colbey and her family struggled to find a place to live and find ways to eat food. Colbey and her family were eventually “given a FEMA camper trailer as temporary housing” (228), which they put on their property. At the time, Marsha was also pregnant yet still worked hard to provide for her family. Unfortunately, she ended up having a stillborn baby. When her neighbor Debbie Cook found this out, she contacted the police. After a pathologist has incorrectly declared the baby’s death as a homicide, Colbey was charged with capital murder. Even though there was no hard evidence that Colbey had killed her child, they still charged her because of her status in the community and her background that framed her as a “bad” mother. This story adds depth to Stevenson’s argument because it shows that the criminal justice system is not only racist but also classist and sexist.

While this point in Stevenson’s argument is important, the more important part of his argument is his discussion of how the criminal justice system is racist and manipulative. His main example of this is through the Walter McMillian case. To begin, the only reason that Walter was even accused of a crime was because a mentally ill white man was forced, by law enforcement, to make a confession that wasn’t true. Law enforcement then continued to manipulate other people to creating fake testimonies to accuse a black man of murdering a white woman. The system and community then continued to make racist remarks about Walter, saying he was a “drug dealer” and a “thug” because he was a black man who had a low income. The sight of Walters skin color was enough for the court and law enforcement to put an innocent man on death row. Throughout the book, Stevenson also points out every place where the court made a mistake or adjusted the rules to make them fit their agenda. Walter shouldn’t have been on death row at all and it definitely shouldn’t have taken six years to get him off of it.

This argument that the criminal justice system is racist and manipulative can also be seen through the examples of the three children who were sentenced to life in prison, which I talked about in an earlier blog post. These children, all under the age of sixteen, were sentenced to life in prison without parole, and in two of the crimes, no one was even killed. Courts were able to manipulate how they charged these children because they felt that the children were “dangerous” because they were black. 

After reading this book and doing extra research outside of the book, I 100% agree with every claim that Stevenson has made. The proportions at which black people are incarcerated compared to white people and the duration that black people stay in prison compared to black people is crazy to think about. As Stevenson mentioned at the beginning of the book, “one in every three black male babies is expected to be incarcerated” (15). Through every detailed example that Stevenson uses throughout the book, it is clear that there is a major problem with the criminal justice system and how they deal with people of color. 

Works Cited

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. 2019 ed., New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2019.