Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done (p. 17)

Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done (p. 17)

Sept. 1, 2019     by Juliet Joly

I read Bryan Stevenson’s memoir Just Mercy during my snow days starting in Nov. 2018 and finishing it over the summer in July 2019.  I was very moved by the way Bryan learned to look at his “clients,” most often men and women on death row or otherwise wrongfully accused and sentenced, with a gaze of complete attention to them as whole persons.  He began to see patterns of systemic poverty, mental illness, and race as prime players in those who are incarcerated and end up on death row. 

As an African American criminal justice lawyer, Bryan was exposed to countless injustice in our ironically named American criminal “justice” system.  The way Bryan looked at these men and women was profoundly human and truth-seeking.  Even after discovering and defending the truth for many of them (often meaning the defendant’s innocence or other reasons validating a milder sentence), his task involved using civil and legal processes and arguments to try to convince various appellate courts and other officials of the truth—the men and women’s innocence or their deserving a lesser sentence than the death penalty. 

               I walked away from this memoir deeply convinced that the death penalty is simply never the best solution to heal broken relationship, to heal a horrific crime, or to remove a dangerous person from society.  A culture of murder generates more murder.  Bryan encountered various persons whose loved ones had been murdered and who expressed they did not feel a sense of justice and calm after the death penalty had been used to “avenge” their loved ones’ murders.  It is so evident from these examples that murder does not avenge murder.  Instead, Bryan realizes, hope and love and forgiveness generate healing and revolutionize our broken culture of death.  What can defeat murder?  Forgiveness, rehabilitation, and second chances. 

               Bryan Stevenson muses toward the conclusion of the book the following paragraphs that I find to be a profound conclusion to his deeply insightful, important experiences:

“I guess I’d never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. […] But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. […]

               “We have a choice.  We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for haling.  Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

“I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. (p. 289) I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak–not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. … We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.

“But simply punishing the broken–walking away from them or hiding them from sight–only ensures that they remain broken and we do too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.

“…there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us. (p. 290)

“The power of just mercy is that it belong to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent–strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration. (p. 294)