By only looking at the title of this biography I assumed that is was another story about incarcerating someone for a crime, and the lawyer works extremely hard to defend their client, and they lose in others they win, but this novel proved me wrong. As an individual pursuing a career in the legal field, reading Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson gave me a new outlook on life, learning about true heartache behind bars. I always knew that being on death row was devastating for the ones who are in line waiting to face their death and for their families but after reading these different stories my mindset changed. As a matter of fact, I strongly agree with Stevenson 's views on death row and the complications of the legal system along with the defective …show more content…
The work Stevenson has accomplished is remarkable to me. I live to help people, I 've learned that Stevenson wouldn 't have it any other way if people were not given that second chance of assistance to changing the outcome of their life. As a society, we see the abundance of inequalities of the justice system every day. People are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit and others are arrested and killed through police brutality. One of the points to Stevenson 's purpose to expressing his life experiences with the public is to show how an individual can be excluded from the outside world no matter their race, age, and past accomplishments. Charlie, 14 years old, relates to my theory of crime sees no identity and crime knows nothing about our past. “Charlie was fourteen years old. He weighed 100 pounds and was just five feet tall. He didn 't have any juvenile criminal history. No prior arrests, no misconduct in school, no delinquencies or prior court appearances…”(Stevenson). Comparatively speaking to the structure of how the summary of Charlie was written, Stevenson essentially expresses the importance of how anyone can be subjected to committing a crime by also expressing that no crime is worth dying for. To be honest, I was shocked at the amount of effort and …show more content…
The purpose of the criminal justice system is to give justice equally among the population, no matter what the judge says they versus what was actual done, everyone deserves the chance to be heard. I have always known that once you have been involved with the law, somehow you 're still subjected to imprisonment, either behind bars or through the eyes of society. Stevenson takes the steps to prevent these things from being on a continuous cycle through his determination and willpower. In essence, I grew to love this book in the past couple of weeks. Bryan Stevenson’s examples of cases resonated with me, along with learning it mainly validated what I already knew, while reading this biography I respectfully took into consideration the reaction of someone else a different race and, or financial class, similarly creating a better viewpoint of criminal justice system for
" With violence affecting so many lives, one can understand the desire driven by fear to lock away young male offenders. But considering their impoverished, danger-filled lives, I wonder whether the threat of being locked up for decades can really deter them from crime" (305). Hopkins is definitely not our stereotypical prisoner. Most generally, our view of prisoners is not that of someone who has this profound use of wording and this broad sense of knowledge.
The non-fiction text I decided to read that led me to my topic of Capital Punishment is titled, Just Mercy by attorney-at-law Bryan Stevenson, and it provides stories of a lawyer who wanted to bring justice to the court system by helping men, women and children, sentenced to death row by helping them obtain their freedom. The book first begins with a back story of the Mr. Stevenson. Bryan Stevenson is a graduate from the law soon of Harvard. His interest in Death Row cases grew when the law office he was interning for sent him to talk to a man, Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to death row after wrongfully being accused of a murder he did not commit and was framed for. Mr. Bryan helped him, and Walter was eventually released about six years in death row. In the book, Mr. Stevenson goes through many cases that he has taken upon, some failures and some great success. The people Bryan helped were mostly minorities who faced racial bias at the time of their trial. He represented not only men, but also children. There’s stories about how a woman whose baby was born dead was sentenced to prison
Just Mercy’s Bryan Stevenson exposes some of these disparities woven around his presentation of the Walter McMillian case, and the overrepresentation of African-American men in our criminal justice system. His accounts of actors in the criminal justice system such as Judge Robert E. Lee and the D.A. Tom Chapman who refused to open up the case or provide support regardless of the overwhelmingly amount of inconsistencies found in the case. The fact that there were instances where policemen paid people off to testify falsely against McMillian others on death row significantly supports this perpetuation of racism. For many of the people of color featured in Stevenson’s book, the justice system was unfair to them wrongfully or excessively punishing them for crimes both violent and nonviolent compared to their white counterparts. Racism towards those of color has caused a “lack of concern and responsiveness by police, prosecutors, and victims’ services providers” and ultimately leads to the mass incarceration of this population (Stevenson, 2014, p. 141). Moreover the lack of diversity within the jury system and those in power plays into the already existing racism. African-American men are quickly becoming disenfranchised in our country through such racist biases leading to over 1/3 of this population “missing” from the overall American population because they are within the criminal justice
In Bryan Stevenson’s essay, “Close To Death: Reflections on Race and Capital Punishment In America” he claims that there is a tremendous racial problem in our criminal justice system. Stevenson explains,
Stevenson wants the reader to feel enraged on behalf of the people about whom he wrote. Using that anger, he wants the readers to be motivated to change the outcome so similar bad situations are less likely to happen again. For example, Stevenson writes about Charlie, a 14-year-old boy who was sentenced as an adult and taken to the adult county jail (120). There, Charlie was sexually abused and raped by multiple people in three days (123, 124). Stevenson tells this story knowing that people will get angry on behalf of Charlie. Since Charlie was a child people become more upset because in society children are precious and should not have their innocence taken from them. Stevenson wants the anger to motivate people to make changes to the system so there will be no more
There were many innocent people that were punished for crimes they did not commit because they could not afford adequate counsel. Being poor and black can become a life or death situation. I believe that both books makes very valid points when it comes to mass incarceration and racial biases. The injustices have become so engrained in the system that many are blind to what is actually going on. More and more black men are becoming incarcerated and this is not because more blacks commit crime, so why then are so many being institutionalized? I believe it is to try to regain that power that was lost from the abolishment of slavery. The New Jim Crow highlighted the creation of the new racial caste system by revealing that the conception of this permanent segregation was implanted well before the Civil Rights Movement ended (Stevenson, 2014). While Just Mercy pinpoints the aftermath of a preconceived idea. It showed that America operated off of fear and anger, rather than truth and
Throughout his novel, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, author and professor Robert Perkinson outlines the three current dominant purposes of prison. The first, punishment, is the act of disciplining offenders in an effort to prevent them from recommitting a particular crime. Harsh punishment encourages prisoners to behave because many will not want to face the consequences of further incarceration. While the purpose of punishment is often denounced, many do agree that prison should continue to be used as a means of protecting law-abiding citizens from violent offenders. The isolation of inmates, prison’s second purpose, exists to protect the public. Rehabilitation is currently the third purpose of prison. Rehabilitation is considered successful when a prisoner does n...
The novel, Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson is an incredible read. In this book, Mr.
So, in a time of social, political and economic change it makes sense that how we enforce the law and systems of punishment would begin to shift into the public eye. Gunther claims that we have a criminal processing system, rather than a criminal justice system; But what makes a criminal justice system an impartial justice oriented system rather than the harsh, biased and unfair processing mechanism that Gunther saw? For this, we look to Packer’s four assumptions of a justice system.
We can conclude with her analyses that the criminal justice in America is biased an even though I don’t agree with the suggestion Alexander has heard from other people that mass incarceration is a “conspiracy to put blacks back in their place” (p.5). It is clear that the justice system in the US is not completely fair, and that collective action must arise to struggle it.
Opponents to mass incarceration like Michelle Alexander have called it the “New Jim Crow”, a social institution aimed at limiting the rights of African Americans. Upon their release criminals are legally denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and placed in a position of subordination. Others would suggest that, “cultural shifts, political realignments, changes in job prospects for low-skilled men, and perhaps most importantly, legal changes” have led to the severe increase and absolute disparity in the rates of black imprisonment over the late 20th and early 21st centuries. One thing is certain, mass incarceration would be justifiable if crime decreased but that is just not the case. Evidence has shown that the benefits of mass imprisonment in reducing crime have diminished over time and incarceration is now a much less effective method for crime control than it was before the 1990s. Due to factual evidence of high rates racial disparity in imprisonment, mass incarceration can be seen as a significant generator of social inequality. The history and the study of mass incarceration is important because it defines us as a society just like slavery and Jim Crow once
Neubauer, D. W., & Fradella, H. F. (2011). America’s courts and the criminal justice system (10th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
“ ….Judgments, right or wrong. This concern with concepts such as finality, jurisdiction, and the balance of powers may sound technical, lawyerly, and highly abstract. But so is the criminal justice system….Law must provide simple answers: innocence or guilt, freedom or imprisonment, life or death.” (Baude, 21).
..., and also used subtle contrasts between characters and places to create in depth detail and to portray the popular secrecy that bound the Victorian era. His feelings and thoughts are cleverly wound into his writing. The morals of the story, it is thought that he wrote the books as an allegory, however discreet are very important. Stevenson believed that gentlemen were hypocrites with outward respectability and inward lust and greed, and in this novel there are several occasions where hypocrisy is brought into the lime light.
The definition of justice and the means by which it must be distributed differ depending on an individual’s background, culture, and own personal morals. As a country of many individualistic citizens, the United States has always tried its best to protect, but not coddle, its people in this area. Therefore, the criminal justice history of the United States is quite extensive and diverse; with each introduction of a new era, more modern technologies and ideals are incorporated into government, all with American citizens’ best interests in mind.