Just Mercy Analysis

Words: 505
Pages: 3

When I was in the eighth grade, my civics teacher passed out a book. In blue words pasted onto the center of the front cover, it read Just Mercy and was written by Bryan Stevenson.

“We will be referencing this book often, so I advise you to follow the roadmap I suggested,” my civics teacher told the class. I heard whispers of complaints zipping in and out of my ears like fruit flies as I got handed my copy.

“Do we really have to read this?” one of my friends complained next to me, “I thought only English gave out the books.” I was a bit disappointed.

I chuckled at her statement a bit, then flipped through the novel. “It seems like a light read,” I leaned back to read the first few pages. My civics class fell silent as my teacher allowed us a few minutes to get started on reading. My fingers flip to the first page,
…show more content…
However, I found myself digesting all the information in the book as I read on. Exposing myself to the cruel facts, the good, and the bad of the legal system. I knew all the things in the book happened. I know the death sentence is a thing, I know people get wrongly convicted, but what I didn’t know was that the lengths of traumatization both victims and suspects receive were far from what I imagined.

To this day, what stuck with me was one of Stevenson’s clients who claimed when someone was on the chair for their death sentence, they could smell the burning. Worst of all, Walter McMillian, Stevenson’s main client in the story who was wrongly convicted of murder, would beg to be released from being imprisoned on death row. Reading that, I felt this guilty feeling. It felt so wrong, how cases like these happen. How they truly exist in our cruel world.

Since reading the book, my interest in injustice has piqued. In my free time, I find myself studying disheartening cases of mass incarceration and even juvenile death row cases. It leaves me with no other feeling except how I feel compelled to