Just Mercy – A Movie Review
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” says Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) and the author of the memoir “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (1).” The 2019 movie, based on the book, stars Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as wrongly convicted inmate Walter McMillian.
The movie, currently available on Netflix, is full of touching performances and has a 90 percent score from top critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Watching as the film interweaves Walter McMillan’s story with several accounts of death-row inmates in a 1980s Alabama prison, one begins to wonder if things have changed since that time. If they have, has it been for better or worse?
The story heavily scrutinizes the criminal justice system, highlighting its many flaws, such as racial inequality, the misuse of the death penalty among people of color, mass incarceration leading to prison overcrowding, wrongful convictions, and more.
According to the EJI, Black men are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated than White men, Latino men are almost three times more likely, and Native Americans are more than twice as likely. Though just 12.1 percent of the population (2), Black people make up 42.38 percent of death row inmates (3). Currently, more than 2 million individuals are in prison, up from 200,000 in 1972 (4). This mass incarceration cost taxpayers $80.7 billion in 2017; in 1975, the cost was $7.4 B (5). Since 1989, 3,175 inmates have been exonerated of their crimes, 375 of them due to DNA evidence (6). In California, the state has paid over $221 million to those wrongfully convicted and imprisoned between 1989 and 2012 (7).
The film ends on a positive note as Walter McMillan is exonerated after spending six years on death row. The EJI continues its work to free its wrongly convicted clients and to reform the criminal justice system. Stevenson said in an interview that we have “a criminal justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent (8).” We only need to look at the current president to assess the truth of this statement.
Take Action
- Watch the film, Just Mercy, available on Netflix.
- Read the award-winning memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (2014), available at the Tuolumne County Library.
- Donate to organizations such as the Equal Justice Initiative, the Innocence Project, the Northern California Innocence Project, and Amnesty International, which all help wrongly incarcerated people.
- Learn what programs your representatives support and contact them with your supporting or opposing views.
NOTES
- Equal Justice Initiative
- Census data obtained from Pew Research.
- “Death Row Overview – Racial Demographics Death Penalty Information Center,” April 1, 2025.
- Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025,” March 11, 2025.
- Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, “Following the Money of Mass Incarceration,” January 25, 2017.
- “Wrongful Convictions: Thousands of people have been wrongly convicted.”
- “Report Says Wrongful Convictions Cost California $221 Million.” The Innocence Project, March 11, 2016.
- Ally Holmes Rosario and Kelly Goddard, “Just Mercy Movie: Q&A with Bryan Stevenson,” November 21, 2019.