Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
A memoir by civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, recounting his career defending death-row prisoners, juveniles, and the poor in the Deep South. Its spine is the case of Walter McMillian, a Black Alabama man sentenced to death for a murder he insisted he did not commit, braided with shorter accounts of other clients caught in the machinery of American criminal justice.
Halfway through the McMillian case the book wanders off. One reader gave up tracking it: "the book went in various directions with no real transitions, by jumping from case to case in the middle of him working what I thought was the main case." Then there is the dialogue, reconstructed decades later, which cost the memoir one reader's trust outright: "I cannot trust the author's episodic memory as he makes up quotes and scenes." From a reviewer who works in law: "His cases are just and strong. Tell the story without credibility-damaging rhetoric." And the stacking never arrives anywhere practical: "like by disc 6, no need to convince me of the problem. tell me how i can help fix it. he never got around to that."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
