JUST MERCY | A STORY OF JUSTICE AND REDEMPTION | FULL BOOK | PDF | DOWNLOAD ||.
CONTENTS :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction: Higher Ground
Chapter One: Mockingbird Players
Chapter Two: Stand
Chapter Three: Trials and Tribulation
Chapter Four: The Old Rugged Cross
Chapter Five: Of the Coming of John
Chapter Six: Surely Doomed
Chapter Seven: Justice Denied
Chapter Eight: All God’s Children
Chapter Nine: I’m Here
Chapter Ten: Mitigation
Chapter Eleven: I’ll Fly Away
Chapter Twelve: Mother, Mother
Chapter Thirteen: Recovery
Chapter Fourteen: Cruel and Unusual
Chapter Fifteen: Broken
Chapter Sixteen: The Stonecatchers’ Song of Sorrow
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Notes
About the Author
INTRODUCTION :
Higher Ground
I wasn’t prepared to meet a condemned man. In 1983, I was a twenty-three-year-old student
at Harvard Law School working in Georgia on an internship, eager and inexperienced and
worried that I was in over my head. I had never seen the inside of a maximum-security prison
—and had certainly never been to death row. When I learned that I would be visiting this
prisoner alone, with no lawyer accompanying me, I tried not to let my panic show.
Georgia’s death row is in a prison outside of Jackson, a remote town in a rural part of the
state. I drove there by myself, heading south on I-75 from Atlanta, my heart pounding harder
the closer I got. I didn’t really know anything about capital punishment and hadn’t even
taken a class in criminal procedure yet. I didn’t have a basic grasp of the complex appeals
process that shaped death penalty litigation, a process that would in time become as familiar
to me as the back of my hand. When I signed up for this internship, I hadn’t given much
thought to the fact that I would actually be meeting condemned prisoners. To be honest, I
didn’t even know if I wanted to be a lawyer. As the miles ticked by on those rural roads, the
more convinced I became that this man was going to be very disappointed to see me.
I studied philosophy in college and didn’t realize until my senior year that no one would pay
me to philosophize when I graduated. My frantic search for a “post-graduation plan” led me
to law school mostly because other graduate programs required you to know something about
your field of study to enroll; law schools, it seemed, didn’t require you to know anything. At
Harvard, I could study law while pursuing a graduate degree in public policy at the Kennedy
School of Government, which appealed to me. I was uncertain about what I wanted to do
with my life, but I knew it would have something to do with the lives of the poor, America’s
history of racial inequality, and the struggle to be equitable and fair with one another. It
would have something to do with the things I’d already seen in life so far and wondered
about, but I couldn’t really put it together in a way that made a career path clear.
Not long after I started classes at Harvard I began to worry I’d made the wrong choice.
Coming from a small college in Pennsylvania, I felt very fortunate to have been admitted, butby the end of my first year I’d grown disillusioned. At the time, Harvard Law School was a
pretty intimidating place, especially for a twenty-one-year-old. Many of the professors used
the Socratic method—direct, repetitive, and adversarial questioning—which had the
incidental effect of humiliating unprepared students. The courses seemed esoteric and
disconnected from the race and poverty issues that had motivated me to consider the law in
the first place.
Many of the students already had advanced degrees or had worked as paralegals with
prestigious law firms. I had none of those credentials. I felt vastly less experienced and
worldly than my fellow students. When law firms showed up on campus and began
interviewing students a month after classes started, my classmates put on expensive suits and
signed up so that they could receive “fly-outs” to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or
Washington, D.C. It was a complete mystery to me what exactly we were all busily preparing
ourselves to do. I had never even met a lawyer before starting law school.
I spent the summer after my first year in law school working with a juvenile justice project
in Philadelphia and taking advanced calculus courses at night to prepare for my next year at
the Kennedy School. After I started the public policy program in September, I still felt
disconnected. The curriculum was extremely quantitative, focused on figuring out how to
maximize benefits and minimize costs, without much concern for what those benefits
achieved and the costs created. While intellectually stimulating, decision theory,
econometrics, and similar courses left me feeling adrift. But then, suddenly, everything came
into focus.
I discovered that the law school offered an unusual one-month intensive course on race and
poverty litigation taught by Betsy Bartholet, a law professor who had worked as an attorney
with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Unlike most courses, this one took students off campus,
requiring them to spend the month with an organization doing social justice work. I eagerly
signed up, and so in December 1983 I found myself on a plane to Atlanta, Georgia, where I
was scheduled to spend a few weeks working with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee
(SPDC).
I hadn’t been able to afford a direct flight to Atlanta, so I had to change planes in Charlotte,
North Carolina, and that’s where I met Steve Bright, the director of the SPDC, who was flying
back to Atlanta after the holidays. Steve was in his mid-thirties and had a passion and
certainty that seemed the direct opposite of my ambivalence. He’d grown up on a farm in
Kentucky and ended up in Washington, D.C., after finishing law school. He was a brilliant
trial lawyer at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and had just been
recruited to take over the SPDC, whose mission was to assist condemned people on death row
in Georgia. He showed none of the disconnect between what he did and what he believed
that I’d seen in so many of my law professors. When we met he warmly wrapped me in a full-
body hug, and then we started talking. We didn’t stop till we’d reached Atlanta.
“Bryan,” he said at some point during our short flight, “capital punishment means ‘them
without the capital get the punishment.’ We can’t help people on death row without help
from people like you.”
I was taken aback by his immediate belief that I had something to offer. He broke down the
issues with the death penalty simply but persuasively, and I hung on every word, completely
engaged by his dedication and charisma.
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