Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the
Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in
Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal
challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating
innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated
and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.
Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United
States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned
prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that
banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all
children seventeen or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won
reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 140 wrongly
condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of
others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.
Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and
anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America.
He led the creation of EJI’s highly acclaimed Legacy Sites,
including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and
Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. These new national
landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching,
and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration
and contemporary issues of racial bias.
“Just Mercy is a remarkable amalgam, at once a searing indictment
of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the
salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.”—David
Cole, The New York Review of Books
“Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made
such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life,
Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very
much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the
oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those
with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story.”—John
Grisham
“A distinguished NYU law professor and MacArthur grant recipient
offers the compelling story of the legal practice he founded to
protect the rights of people on the margins of American society. .
. . Emotionally profound, necessary reading.”—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review, Kirkus Prize Finalist)
“A searing, moving and infuriating memoir . . . Injustice is easy
not to notice when it affects people different from ourselves; that
helps explain the obliviousness of our own generation to inequity
today. We need to wake up. And that is why we need a Mandela in
this country.”—Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
“Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age. . .
. This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two
affecting contexts . . . The message of the book, hammered home by
dramatic examples of one man’s refusal to sit quietly and
countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can
be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you
hopeful. . . . Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice
system] for years, and we are all the better for it.”—Ted Conover,
The New York Times Book Review
“Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most
inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and
Just Mercy is extraordinary. The stories told within these pages
hold the potential to transform what we think we mean when we talk
about justice.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
“A passionate account of the ways our nation thwarts justice and
inhumanely punishes the poor and disadvantaged.”—Booklist (starred
review)
“This is a book of great power and courage. It is inspiring and
suspenseful—a revelation.”—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth
of Other Suns
“Words such as important and compelling may have lost their force
through overuse, but reading this book will restore their meaning,
along with one’s hopes for humanity.”—Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
“Just Mercy should be read by people of conscience in every
civilized country in the world to discover what happens when
revenge and retribution replace justice and mercy. It is as
gripping to read as any legal thriller, and what hangs in the
balance is nothing less than the soul of a great nation.”—Desmond
Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
