Just Mercy Comparison

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Just Mercy, a memoir, and To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel, are set in different eras featuring characters who have been accused of felonies. In Just Mercy, Walter McMillan is a black man who was found guilty and sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman. On the other hand, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson, also a black man, was falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell, and was put on trial. While circumstances and factors in both cases somewhat differ, each book addresses the grave issues situated in the judicial government back then and even today. Despite the contrasting outcomes in the cases of Tom Robinson and Walter McMillan in Just Mercy and To Kill a Mockingbird, both characters display unjust flaws through …show more content…
Walter McMillan, a hard-working and down-to-earth man, who helped out with various jobs for those in the community, was randomly accused of murdering a young woman due to the suspicion of prior knowledge of an interracial affair. Furthermore, Stevenson describes the treatment that Walter McMillan received during his arrest for being a person of color as outrageous, Sheriff Thomas Tate “unleashed a torrent of racial slurs and threats” continuing to state that he “ought to take you off and hang you like we did that ni***r in Mobile” (Stevenson, 48). The excessive amount of inappropriate insults uttered by Sheriff Tate reveals his loss of professionalism and composure, which leads to the assumption that he had no intent or commitment to bringing justice to the world. The fact that Sheriff Tate was let off the hook and wasn’t taken accountable for his behavior, underscores the need to take into consideration when picking those to entrust to the government because a factor that leads to wrongful convictions is personal