Summary Of Just Mercy By Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson was born in the poor rural community of Milton Delaware in 1959. Stevenson grew up attending school in a segregated system where he first began noticing racial inequalities. His father had been murdered in a Philadelphia housing project when Stevenson was just a teenager, which he then began to question the racial and economic inequalities throughout his community. These injustices Stevenson had experience drove him into writing the profound book ‘Just Mercy’. Stevenson’s purpose for writing this book was to spread realization on the bias’ within the criminal justice system. Bryan Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, throughout the book he talks about his diligent job as a lawyer.

I always thought juveniles who committed crimes would be tried for their age, but consequently, within the past few years more young teens have been tried as adults, and forced into life-long sentences and even in some cases, death row. In one case Stevenson worked with a young girl named Trina Garnett had been in a house fire and was blamed for ‘intentionally’ starting the fire. Within the trial, the Judge who was ruling the case declared Trina had no intent to kill. One thing Stevenson mentioned was that “Under Pennsylvania Law, the judge could not take the absence of intent into account during sentencing” (page 150). Trina was convicted of second-degree murder at age sixteen. The criminal justice system is full of unreasonable laws and reasonings as to why someone would be convicted even if they were declared of not having the ‘intent’ for the crime. These aged laws are a convict of microassaults, they consciously have discriminatory

There is no segregation between adults and children within the system. Children are entirely different from grown adults, they have different needs, wants, they need to learn and find themselves. When placed in an adult prison they have lost all those needs, and wants, and are expected to act like an adult. Adolescents placed in jail for drug use need restorative action, rehabilitation for their actions. If these children placed in adult jails for drugs get released they are most likely to be apart of the recidivism rate and end up back in jail for drug use once again. Juveniles need rehabilitation instead of lifelong sentences their deviance could be factors of conformity to how they grew up, and we need to help them grow out of their old ways to become a new person instead of sitting in a cell for the rest of their