Question 1

Who is Walter McMillian and what happened to him?

Accepted Answer

Walter McMillian is the central case in Just Mercy: a Black man from Monroeville, Alabama (the hometown of Harper Lee and the model for the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird), he was arrested in 1987 for the murder of a young white woman named Ronda Morrison. He was convicted and sentenced to death despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence — including the testimony of numerous witnesses who confirmed that he was at a fish fry miles away at the time of the murder — and despite the fact that the prosecution's case rested on the testimony of a single witness who later recanted and admitted he had been coerced. Bryan Stevenson took McMillian's case through the Equal Justice Initiative and, after years of legal battles, secured his exoneration in 1993. McMillian's case is representative of many of the systemic failures that Just Mercy documents: the vulnerability of Black defendants to wrongful conviction, the coercion of witnesses, the inadequacy of legal representation for those who cannot afford private attorneys, and the particular cruelty of Alabama's death penalty system.

Question 2

What is the Equal Justice Initiative?

Accepted Answer

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a nonprofit legal organization founded by Bryan Stevenson in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989, to provide legal representation to people in the criminal justice system who have been wrongly convicted, who were sentenced as children to life without parole or death, and who are on death row. EJI has won relief for more than 140 wrongly condemned prisoners and has challenged unconstitutional conditions in Alabama's prisons. Stevenson and EJI have also been central to the legal battles against the juvenile life without parole sentence — arguing that sentencing children to die in prison constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment — and won a Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. Alabama (2012) establishing that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional. EJI also operates the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, the first memorial in the United States dedicated to the victims of lynching, and the Legacy Museum, which documents the history of racial terror and its relationship to contemporary mass incarceration.

Question 3

Is Just Mercy related to To Kill a Mockingbird?

Accepted Answer

Just Mercy does not directly engage with To Kill a Mockingbird, but the connection is striking: Walter McMillian was from Monroeville, Alabama, the hometown of Harper Lee and the model for Maycomb, the fictional Alabama town in To Kill a Mockingbird, and his wrongful conviction for the murder of a white woman is precisely the kind of case that To Kill a Mockingbird imagined in the fictional trial of Tom Robinson. Stevenson has noted the irony: the town that Harper Lee made famous as the setting for a story about racial injustice in the courts was, fifty years later, the site of exactly that injustice. The connection illuminates the limits of To Kill a Mockingbird's liberal redemption narrative — Atticus Finch loses the Tom Robinson case — and the ongoing reality of wrongful convictions in the same geography. Stevenson's project is in a sense the continuation of the work that Atticus Finch failed to complete.

Just Mercy Reading Order

Complete Just Mercy Book List

Just Mercy

Just Mercy — Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Walter McMillian and what happened to him?

What is the Equal Justice Initiative?

Is Just Mercy related to To Kill a Mockingbird?

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