Just Mercy: A Story Of Justice And Redemption Quotes
"Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done."
"The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."
"You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close."
"Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person’s humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own."
"The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned."
"I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us."
"Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others."
"People think these are my scars, cuts, and bruises. These are my medals of honor."
"I’ve discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity."
"Condemned prisoners on Alabama’s death row unit are housed in windowless concrete buildings that are notoriously hot and uncomfortable."
"Existence at Holman centered on Alabama’s electric chair. They called it 'Yellow Mama.'"
"At 8:30 P.M. the first jolt of 1,900 volts of electricity passed through Mr. Evans’s body. It lasted thirty seconds."
"The execution of John Evans took fourteen minutes."
"For his first three weeks on Alabama’s death row, the horrific execution of John Evans was pretty much all he heard about."
"He saw in the people who arrested him a contempt that he’d never experienced before."
"He genuinely believed the accusations against him had been a serious misunderstanding."
"Prison officials had shaved his head and all the hair from his face. Looking in a mirror, he didn’t recognize himself."
"Fear and anguish unlike anything he’d ever experienced settled on Walter."
"Fight for yourself. Don’t trust your lawyer. They can’t put you on death row without being convicted."
"I hadn’t ever experienced anything like this before in my life."
"He had always been well liked and gotten along with just about everybody."
"When the days turned into weeks, Walter began to sink into deep despair."
"I found a small building near downtown Montgomery... It felt like a home and a place to work."
"We were denied funding from the state legislature, which we needed to get federal matching dollars."
"By the end of 1989, the number of people executed by the State of Alabama would double."
"I tried to explain the constraints on resources and time, telling them how frantic we were just trying to get the new office up and running."
"They called Tate the next morning and told him that he would say whatever he wanted if he would get him off death row."
"Each judge competes to be the toughest on crime."
"What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?"
"The surreal whirlwind of the preceding weeks had left Walter devastated."
"In February 1989, Eva Ansley and I opened our new nonprofit law center in Tuscaloosa, dedicated to providing free, quality legal services to condemned men and women on death row in Alabama."
"I’m a rebel. Part of the 117th division of the Confederate Army."
"But because we were standing next to him that whole morning… We know where he was.… We know what he was doing!"
"But what we’re currently doing to him is mean and irresponsible."
"No one knows more than I do how destructive and reckless Ian’s crime was."
"When this crime was committed, he was a child, a thirteen-year-old boy with a lot of problems."
"America’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill."
"It’s like the system has buried me alive and I’m dead to the outside world."
"Sometimes I forget how we all need mitigation at some point."
"I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness."
"The bad things that happen to us don’t define us."
"I’ve been in solitary confinement approx. 14.5 years."
"I never saw the officer again; someone told me he quit not long after that last time I saw him."
"Law students had started arriving for short-term internships, which provided us with additional legal assistance."
"The caller had described our building precisely when making his threat."
"The actions of the witness that lend credence to his trial testimony and the actions of the witness that lend credence to his recantation."
"We had won four reversals in death penalty cases in 1990, four more in 1991, and by the end of 1992, we’d won relief for another eight death row prisoners."
"But none of them had signed on for bomb threats."
"She said the man had sounded middle-aged and Southern, but she couldn’t give any more of a description."
"It was hard to know how seriously to take any of it, but it was definitely unnerving."
"We wanted people to understand this simple fact: Walter did not commit that murder."
"The court didn’t conclude that he was innocent and must be released, but it ruled in our favor on every other claim and ordered a new trial."
"Despite my general reluctance about media on pending cases, I believed that if people in Monroe County heard enough reports that Walter had been released because he was innocent, there would be less resistance to accepting him when he returned home."
"Despite the local media reaction, the CBS coverage gave the community a summary of the evidence we’d presented in court and created questions and doubts about Walter’s guilt."
"At the time Walter was set free, Alabama was not among the handful of states that provided aid to innocent people released from prison."
"We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent."
"The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving."
"Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of others; it also exposed my own brokenness."
"Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion."
"We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt."
"Embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy."
"You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it."
"Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice."
"The extreme overrepresentation of people of color in prisons can only be fully understood through the lens of our racial history."
"Having a bigger staff with very talented people made meeting the new challenges created by our much broader docket seem possible."
"The total ban on life-without-parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicides should have been the easiest decision to implement."
"In some cases, clients had already been in prison for decades and had very few, if any, support systems to help them re-enter society."
"We were committed to providing services, housing, job training, life skills, counseling, and anything else people coming out of prison needed to succeed."
"I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other."
"Walter genuinely forgave the people who unfairly accused him, the people who convicted him, and the people who had judged him unworthy of mercy."
"Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving."
"Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous."